The Centauri Device Part 16

Perhaps the Device was calling subtly to its inheritor, perhaps he honestly wanted a confrontation. Certainly, as he slipped out onto the bitter streets of die The Centauri Device 151.

port, black and ragged in his cloak like a wounded crow, he wanted revenge; by the time he'd pa.s.sed the high wire fence of the landing field, he had convinced himself that his anger was more than personal; and he believed as he strode between the rocket pits under the white arc lights that the time for pa.s.sive misery and acceptance was over.

It wasn't When he located the Ella Speed (he'd somehow forgotten the paint job and the new name), he found her loading ramp extended tike the tongue of an immense mechanical mouth.

Fix the bosun was lying huddled up on it He was dead.

His lips peeled back from those sawmill teeth, he was curled fetally round a ma.s.sive abdominal wound, as if his final horrified act had been- an attempt to contain the several pints of fluid congealing on the diamond tread of the ramp beneath him. His eyes were narrowed, his fingers were all in a knot; under the port arcs, his features were composed of precise white planes "and cold shadows, a brutal, quite alien morphology of emotion, memoir of a hard death.

Truck (down on his knees again, with his hands in tiie bosun's blood and his mind on the corpse boats of Cor Caroli, where, under the same clinical illumination, there was at least a little peace, an order to the serried rows) heaved and retched. He wiped himself on Fix's yellow jerkin, coughing dismally. ("A pumpkin," he explained, "is what your head is. Don't forget, novegetable seeds.") Since their government is semifeudal, Chromians acquire early a deep familiarity with death, but: Oh, you poor sod, he thought, you poor little sod. This was nothing like the loss of Pater, whom he'd hardly known; or of Angina Seng, who hadn't died alone under bleak lights.

Images of Fix: mafficking across the Galaxy in search of freedom and dope and Ing Denebian wh.o.r.es, 152.

The Centauri Device his grinning mouth hungry to eat it all down; shivering and blinking on the steps of courthouses in the morning, wondering where to go next after being busted and spending the night telling weird Chromian jokes ("- and were they t.i.ts? Not on your life. Intellectual melons!," with n.o.body among the soreheaded jailed losers knowing quite how to laugh at this hick who found everything new they thought was old); Fix horrible hi trashcan alley fights, the morals of a goat, vital, alive-dead.

"What can I do?w whispered Truck, cupping the back of the great round head in his hands. He couldn't even bring himself to close the eyelids. He got up.

Someone was going to be killed. He gazed speculatively along the length of the boat toward the command bridge, then went inside.

My Ella Speed, a light haulage vehicle of the "Transit" cla.s.s, registered out of Carter's Snort, Earth, and licensed to transfer up to one thousand tons of freight over distances less than a thousand light years-she mounted three Dynaflow converters (each outputting about fifty gigaton hours per every half ton of fuel consumed) and a "Powerslide" rocket pile for sub-Dyne maneuvers such as planetfall; her cramped little hold had carried everything from neat nitrome-thane for the curious engines of Anywhere to five thousand live ferrets genetically modified to survive the curious atmosphere of t.i.tus-Bode.

Now, except for a few string-tied bundles of "Some Words of Plain Good Sense hi a Time of Trouble," it was empty and hollow, amplifying the sc.r.a.pe of John Truck's bootsoles as he rifled Fix the bosun's belongings in search of a gun.

He padded forward through that sweet and dirty ship. In- the engine room, where instrumentation flickered and clicked and the display board said power down in arrays of colored lights, Fix had left himself a final note: CLENE HTE RUNIN GEER. Truck screwed it up and chucked it on the floor without so much as a smile. He put his shoulder against the corn- The Centaur; Device 153.

mand-cabin hatch and shoved. It was locked. Temper gone, he tried to kick it hi and was rewarded by Tiny Skeffern's voice from the other side.

"Truck, there's some mad sod in here with a gun." He sounded m.u.f.fled and distant Truck said nothing. d.a.m.n him for being in the way. A scuffling sound.

"He says h.e.l.l shoot if you don't come in quietly. I think he means it.M "Oh, HeW" Poor old Tiny. "All right then." The electronic lock hummed and chimed, the hatch slid open. Truck dropped Fix's chopper, and the sound clattered back along the subframe of the boat like a laugh. "I'll get you, you b.a.s.t.a.r.d," he said, holding out his hands to demonstrate their emptiness.

Tiny had got himself backed up into a comer, his hands well above his head, small beads of sweat on his bald patch. A shallow laceration with bruised edges ran down his left cheek. He looked accusingly at Truck and complained, "I don't think much of your friends." Track moved a bit further into the cabin, to discover Colonel Gadaffi ben Barka lounging against the approach-radar board with an arid smile on his thin lips.

"Don't think that'll help you when the time comes," Truck told nun, nodding at the military issue Chambers gun that had lately blown such a large hole hi Fix the bosun's insides. "I owe you for all this, ben Barka. n.o.body threatens me on my own boat"

The Arab shrugged elegantly. He had crossed one leg over the other, his whole body unconsciously mimicking the feral repose of his own death commandos. His uniform was as neat as a pin. But he looked tired, and the desert, never very far away, was etching at his brain."You shot my bosun,** Truck insisted.

Ben Barka's soft brown eyes hooded themselves for a heartbeat. He seemed to be studying his pistol. "You can't think I'm unaware of that, Captain. Neither are you aware of how much is at stake. You did plenty of killing last night."

Another oasis choked to death in the 154.

The Centauri Device long, empty night. "He attacked me after fair warning. He was very brave. Do you think I did it lightly? I'm sorry if you do."

John Truck had found Fix the dwarf washed up in the port hinterland of Gloam-disoriented and illiterate among the hustlers and prost.i.tutes, having no real understanding of the twilight subculture that had swallowed him after his escape from the rural manors and squirearchies of Chrome. The two-thousand light-year brawl that had followed was Truck's responsibility; so was its end, down there under the arc lamps of Aver-nus. Like Annie Truck, Fix was a dependent.

"Are you apologizing to me? I didn't own him. Apologize to him!"

"Come, Captain-**

*Tm going to kick you to death some day, you b.a.s.t.a.r.d.**

The desert shifted, rustled, extended its perimeters; it had made vast inroads since the meeting in the ganger's shed: from being a means, a sympathetic terrain for imaginary revenges, it had mutated into an end. The olive groves had withered, the aqueducts fallen to rubble. Cairo and Alexandria was bleached sh.e.l.ls hi the ancient sunlight. High up in mountains ben Barka had never seen, exfoliation was cracking rock enough to make a Galactic sand-sea; sand was already spilling from his skufl to submerge everything; in peace, he would slip along the wadies of die mind, stalking Reality's pitiful little punitive expeditions- He made a small gesture with the pistol. "If you'll take your place at the controls, Captain Truck. Your vessel has been commandeered." His teeth were like bones exposed by the dry winds. "Mr. Skeffern, you'll note, is still alive and well.**

"Get your backside of! the switchgear if you want the boat to go anywhere, ben Barka."

The command-cabin of a Transit cla.s.s hauler is laid out with dual controls and duplicated navigational aids; two acceleration chairs provide access to these, and a 155 third can be brought up on runners from the rear of the bridge and locked abreast of the other two. It is a habit of transport pilots to leave this one permanently in place; ben Barka sat himself down in it and indicated that Truck and Tiny should strap-in either side of him. He put his pistol close to Tiny's ear.

"I think you were going my way anyway, Captain. We might as well travel together."

"Oh yes?" Truck powered up his controls. "Where's that?"

Ben Barka sighed and shook his head. "Captain, Captain. The pistol's pointing hi the wrong direction for obliquity." He smiled down at Tiny, who hunched his shoulders like a nomad in a sandstorm. "GrishMn, that impatient priest, had it from normally reliable sources that today had been chosen for an Arab attempt on the IWG blockade of Centauri VII (there is in fact an action in progress there; it's significant enough to keep IWG fully occupied, but hardly planned to be an actual military success).

**He realized almost immediately that he could never wish for a better diversion-with the result that you, Captain, received an en clair message from him early this morning. (It was couched, I felt, hi rather fulsome tones even for a priest.) He expects your landing to go quite un.o.bserved by either myself or the good General Gaw. He may even be down there already, waiting for you-one of our ships reported a boat hi Opener livery sneaking a shade ineptly past the perimeters of the engagement some two hours ago."It was me who leaked the information to his pathetic intelligence machine; they'd never have got it without help, I don't wonder he didn't bother to code the message. Half his people are working for me or the General anyway. There you have it: we're going to the same place, Captain, We always were."

Truck engaged a bank of rocker switches below the engine-room repeaters and wanned up the Powerslide pile for take-off, wondering just how much allowance 156 ben Barka had made for Grishkin's fanaticism and the GeneraTs not inconsiderable cunning.

"Be it on your own head, Colonel.**

My Etta Speed rumbled and shook. The cargo ramp pulled itself hi slowly, tipping Fix the bosun into the hold like a bale of fresh animal skins. Truck got a go-ahead from the Port Authority, giving his destination as Sad al Bari and his cargo as "mining machinery." Two ma.s.sive, caterpillar-tracked LTOA vehicles moved in across the dock and stood the boat gently on her tail. He checked that Tmy's controls were shut down, worked the rocket engines through the prelift part of their power-curve a coupte of times.

"I can go any tune you want, Colonel.**

"Do it."

My Ella Speed, well into the spirit of the thing, wiggled along her length like a b.i.t.c.h in heat, and threw herself upward.

While the colossal cruisers- of UASR(N) have so-called "autonomic gravity"

environments which protect their crews against the devastating G effects of a battle maneuver, thud-hand Transit cla.s.s haulers do not They are safe from inertia only during dyne-field shifts; and My Ella Speed, l.u.s.tily fighting the attractions of Avernus, made it from relative rest to escape speed in a very short time indeed.

The multi-G blast is a concomitant of the s.p.a.cer's way of life; Truck and Tiny, who had been lifting like that since birth-and before-took it stoically, with G standing on their faces and stumping all over their ribs.

But ben Barka was used to a more generous kind of travel. Perhaps he simply forgot Certainly, it was too late when he remembered.

He dropped his Chambers gun when they were about a mfle up. He tried comically to move his arms from his sides, sweat breaking out all over his face. His eyes rolled and protruded as Truck poured it relentlessly on. He gasped for breath; his skull snapped back against the head-restraint When he tried to shift

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jt, Truck-feeling somewhat wilted himself-made a vast effort, steered his hand the full two inches from armrest to controls^ and let it fall against the emergency thrust b.u.t.ton.

My Ella Speed howled and quaked. Ben Barka made a choked, surprised sort of sound. His eyes opened wide; suddenly, a dark thin trickle of blood issued sluggishly from his left nostril. His tongue poked out from under his mustache like a misshapen fig. He pa.s.sed out.

Captain John Truck, a haulage man from way back, who, in the dark womb of Annie Truck, had come down the infamous Carling Line in an unguided drone that was little more than a high-G tin can with refrigeration, held it until Tiny Skeffern was unconscious too, just to make sure. Then he settled into a parking orbit, said, "Never mess with a pro on his own ground, Colonel," and began to run checks on Etta's misused hull. He'd been in tougher lifts.

Egerton's Port got on to him by radio and wanted to know just what the boy-wonder Rocket Ace in the clapped-out Transit thought he was up to.

He grinned. "Sorry about that," he told them. "Wrong switch." Horse laughs all around.

A few minutes later, Tiny woke up and unstrapped himself. "That was a bit b.l.o.o.d.y hairy," he complained. He saw ben Barka. "Oh-ho!" he said. "Can I shoot him?" he asked, getting hold of the pistol, which had fallen down the side of his seat, and waving it carefully around."No, I'm going to put him out of the rear lock without a suit.'It's something I just thought of," said Truck proudly. "h.e.l.l look good, going down on the night side. It's quite artistic, really."

Modesty, modesty.

Tiny examined ben Barka's congested face. "You hit me," he said coldly. He reached out and wiped the barrel of the Chambers gun down the Arab's cheek.

"Go 158.

The Centaur! Device 159.

on, Truck,** he said, "let me shoot him, eh?" He grinned ingratiatingly.

Truck took the gun off him, got his hands under the Colonel's armpits, and with difficulty hauled him aft, bruising the limp body in frequent collisions with bulk-beads and pieces of machinery. "Sorry, ben Barka." Ben Barka, looking a bit of a mess and still out, said nothing. Truck sn.i.g.g.e.red. "You're going to enjoy this, ben Barka." And he described to the Colonel just how it might feel out there in the graveyard orbit, down along that firework trajectory. But when he arrived in the cargo bay he forgot all about that for a while; and by the time he had finished composing Fix's poor torn corpse, he'd decided to put ben Barka in a suit after all. '

It would give him time to wake up and take an interest in the long drop.

He went forward, sealed the bulkheads, and evacuated the hold with no prayers.

Out went Fix and ben Barka, in a white storm of Opener leaflets. Ben Barka's suit began to broadcast immediately and indiscriminately-an all-band distress call. "d.a.m.n," said Truck. "Isn't that just typical?"

Egerton's Port came through again. "Are you going to hang around all day, Intestinal Revelation?" said the duty officer. "We need that slot." Then, suspiciously: "Is there something wrong up there? I keep getting something that sounds like an SOS," "It's a fault, actually," said Truck. "It doesn't sound like a fault to me.w There was a pause. "I've got someone here from the Port Authority. They want to know what an Opener vessel is doing hauling ironmongery to Sad a! Ban-" "Oops," said Truck.

"-not to mention going off the field like half a frigate squadron. Can you a.s.sist?"

Truck switched the communications gear off. "Tiny," he said, "start the Dynaflows. We're leaving."

He fired up the navigational systems and set Ella Speed hunting like a three-dimensional compa.s.s needle until her blunt prow pointed at Alpha Centauri (or a spot where her sluggish internal processes remembered it to be). Tiny got the converters operating and came back up to the bridge. The exterior screens shimmered eerily, already probing out into the mysterious reaches of s.p.a.ce.

"Right," said Truck. He cut in the Dynaflows, pushed the throttles about, and the old Ella howled down the Galactic freeway toward Centauri, on overdrive.

"It's time we started getting some of our own back, Tiny."

There wasn't much hope of getting their own back on anything they found orbiting Centauri VII. Six or seven hundred miles off the wan gray face of that murdered planet, Ella Speed pushed her bows into the edge of the immense envelope of debris. Like the remains of huge animals in some valley too deep for dawn to reach, forgotten in a mist of frozen air, dead ships lay in futile ambush for Eternity. It was a dark, stifl zone, full of dead men drifting in slow curves among fused machinery, rat-trapped with the dull red embers of melted atomic piles, whole engine rooms, like lumps of cooling slag, decaying hi sullen aureoles of radio-static. Deeper in, parts of the graveyard were stfll fun of a white, fitful glare, a deceptive and piscine motion, as a few bolt-shaped UASR(N) cruisers slugged it grimly out with IWG. ITiey were outnumbered and un-formated, but they seemed to be fully occupying the Fleet-no vacuum commandos were out, communications silence were beingobserved. Truck tried frequency after frequency, found interference breaking like waves on a beach strewn with smashed and rusting armor at the candle-end of time. He picked up a few desultory syllables of a common Morphian dialect (enough at least to tell him who had done the dying 160.

out there), a moan, gunfire scissoring open a hull, distant, decaying, obsessive.

Ella Speed nosed on through a dream of violence. None of the combatants spotted her. Behind her, quite unaware of each other, the cruisers Solomon afld Nas-ser skulked the graveyard like two pike after the same minnow. Truck never suspected he might be followed; perhaps he was too occupied by the young gunner from Parrot who had attached himself to the boat, tumbling lazily about her bow in some gravitational eddy, beckoning Truck and Tiny on with one stiif arm as if inviting them out there to share his cold peace. His intestines, covered in a h.o.a.rfrost of condensation, were spilling infinitely slowly from his ruptured pressure suit, but his insignia were polished and bright.

Truck couldn't tell which side he was on.

Centauri captured them, filled the screens like an accusation. Only one planet was ever killed- At the climax, the absolute fervid crux of MIEV bombardment, when defense is a rag of memory in a hot wind and the sky shakes with ionization, much of the surface water is stripped off the crust as "live" or superheated steam. The target vanishes under a cloudbelt several miles deep, there is a corresponding radical increase in its albedo-a last despairing heliograph of pain- At five o'clock in the afternoon, July 4, 2180 A.M., the shroud covered Centauri and, as a good shroud should, spared the living the ultimate patient indictment of the dead. The General Gaws of the day turned from their bomb-room repeaters, satisfied, shrugging and yawning-perhaps even a little bored-and certainly wondering how they might turn one half of Earth into the same sort of mess without actually damaging the other beyond habitable minimums laid down by their biologists. Ever since that merciful occlusion,

161.

Centauri had been a rubbish heap smelling of wet ashes.

By the time Dr. Grishkin, under the auspices of G.o.d and a well-known Galactic encyclopedia, came to sink his first bore in search of the bunkers, a lukewarm rain had been falling evenly over the new landscape for almost two hundred years. He found a planetary fen drained by vast slow rivers: shallow, stagnant meres, inconceivable acreages of mud-fiat and salting-and every cubic foot of water filled with corrupt organic matter caught at some point between decay and dissolution, cloudy, brackish with old death. None of the continents resembled anything he found on the pre-Genocide maps; finally, it was beneath the human and animal silts of the estuaries and deltaic fans that he discovered water percolating through the slaughtered re-golith in small secret streams, to the abandoned redoubts miles beneath.

There, he dug.

If he was a little mad to begin with, Centauri helped him further along the way. Nothing was alive there, unless you count the echoes of water. Water-and the wind, mumbling thick-lipped between the blasted, mysterious columns of masonry that poked up through the silt like fingers searching the air for the source of their long pain. In continual twilight, corpse-lights shone. The sky was green and gray, luminous with radio-decay products. Wind walking in a rubbish heap; dead lights and water; something was haunting Centauri, but it wasn't the Centaurans- They were underfoot, even their due corruption suspended for some other time.

John Truck brought his boat home along a line of lavender flame, aiming for Grishkin's fifteen-figure reference. She settled steaming and contracting on a mudbank. Around her stretched the flat, unmarked flood-plain of some vast estuary off to the east. Nothing moved, nothing cried out or ran away. For amo- 162.

ment, the rain had stopped, but there was nothing out here to notice.

After a few minutes, Truck and Tiny emerged from the cargo bay done up in white carbon-fiber helmets, lead-gla.s.s goggles, and respirators like squat black snouts. Dark, shiny jumper-suits covered then: bodies, which were full of anti-radiation drugs (prescribed) and amphetamine (unprescribed) from Ella's overstocked medical chest. Truck's Opener cloak flapped drearily in the wind. They stood around in silence, shuffling their feet and gawping at the inhospitable landscape; pointed in different directions and waved their arms at one another; then set off along the indistinct banks of a clogged watercourse.

Despite the amphetamine, Truck became quickly depressed-at first disturbed, then obsessed by the puzzling, fibrous consistency of the mud. When a tangle of thin bones, eroded and luminescent white, caught at his feet, he measured his length in the stuff. Thrashing about with revulsion, he kicked Tiny-who was irritably attempting to help-in the chest. "Do it yourself, then." He wiped himself off. Down there were nests of papery, corroded steel, lumps of stone, objects. He'd come up holding the broken handle of some piece of domestic apparatus, bright blue. He shuddered and threw it away. Tiny wasn't speaking to him.

It was a miserable excursion. Panting and withdrawn, they struggled upstream, looking for a sign- which they eventually found in the shape of Omega Shaft.

By then, Truck was convinced by some half-dream that everything was still going on down there in the silt. He grew fearful that some initiation lay before him, some induction-inevitable by right of birth-into the strange decomposed half-life of his mother's race, an existence carried on hi terms he couldn't quite imagine, in smashed houses among bits and travesties of human paraphernalia acc.u.mulated without logic after their drift down the watercourse.

Hidden in a freak fold of land, the Omega Shaft

163.

complex of buildings-from which Dr. Grishkin had begun the excavation which was to lead to the discovery of the Centauri Device-was a sprawl of ma.s.sive precast concrete sheds, dull hi color and filmed with an unpleasant moisture.

They served to house the generators, air-exchangers, and lift motors of the shaft, a collection of machinery that in operation caused the ground to vibrate palpably. It was surrounded by a chainlink fence into which was set a military checkpoint-a later addition of General Alice Gaw's.

Subsonics from the deeper levels of the bore itself trembled in Truck's bones as he stood with Tiny just beyond the reach of the arc-lights that surrounded the compound, sweating in the heat from the nearest extractor outlet. A small, stubby ship was parked on its tail hi the gloom a hundred yards from the checkpoint: hull scorched and deformed by a misjudged high speed re-entry, Venturis sunk fifteen feet into the ooze, it wouldn't be leaving that place for some time. It was empty, and a recent, hasty paint job hadn't obscured its Opener livery. It had the air of something abandoned by an owner whose mind was occupied elsewhere.

Truck hung about indecisively for a while, human silt drying and flaking off his coverall. The gates (and indeed the whole complex) seemed to be deserted.

The Fleet police weren't in evidence, and neither could he detect any sign of military activity. He turned to the dim, snouted little figure by his side, and pantomimed an advance.

"I'm not going down there, mate-w "Yes, you b.l.o.o.d.y are."

Tiny dragged his feet. In silence and moving slowly, like the performers of some decadent ch.o.r.eography rehearsing without audience, they made it to the checkpoint. No one greeted them.Two dead Fleet men lay face up in the mud by the gates, their respirators torn off. Their goggles had been shattered by the same explosion that had torn down the fence, but they were otherwise undamaged. Their 164.

eyes were fixed on Centauri's unforgiving sty, and it was hard to dispel the impression that something had issued from the shifting streams of silt and finished them off without a sound.