Eater. Part 34

"So beautiful."

"Real pretty for a suicide run."

This jolted Benjamin a little. He craned to see the Eater, out somewhere near the moon. A blue speck.

"We've got boosters out the kazoo," Sharon said. "Hope you're ready for a roller coaster."

"I've got a date with my girl," he countered. "Go "Go."

Now he knew why he felt so fine.

3.

Channing said, "That phrase, 'my kernel intelligence'-I agree with Kingsley. That might be the Old One."

"Could be. Can you reach it?"

She sensed Benjamin floating in the cowling of his sensaround as he watched/felt her. He was sending all sorts of secondary sensation-the headset pressure, visual processing cues, the wheeze of his shallow breathing. But these were just add-ons to his abstractions, or so they came to her. The miniboosters tugged at him as the craft accelerated and she heard their angry snarl. These she gobbled up, for they suddenly reminded her of how achingly far she was from her old, real body. Emotions washed over her aplenty, but she was sensation-starved.

"The cyberguys have identified a whole catalog of different 'signature' memory waves," she said, accessing her crisp memories. "The Old One has a trademark bunch of Alfven waves tagging its parts, as nearly as they can make out. Those tags are all over the dipolar shape of the fields. A diffuse storage method. Probably to give it a holographic quality."

"So we can kill part of it, maybe, but not all."

"Smart b.a.s.t.a.r.d, it is."

"This 200 gigaHertz band works beautifully," he said mildly, the mellow tones telling her that they had done a good job on him. He had weathered the trip untroubled. "You're so...full."

"I love having you so close."

Somehow he was now more deeply embedded in the s.p.a.ce of her perceptions. Like pale sunlight beams lancing through her 3-D self. The cyberfellas had been sharpening the software again.

"What's that music?"

"Oh." She felt the rhythm eddying through her, called up by his notice of it. "I have it all the time, I guess. Music integrates parts of the mind that make sense of memory, of timing and language. It retools me. When I started up here, I thought it was pointless, working in areas with no real use, like motor control. Until I found that the designers used those parts to pilot my Searchers. Thrifty guys."

"It's more than music, isn't it. It's..."

"Feeling? Yeah, I caught on to that once I used it some. The story they fed me is, there must've been neural mechanisms that deciphered music in the early hominid brain. That may have developed as a way to communicate emotion before language came along."

"Wow, it feels different."

"Yeah, somebody's going to make a bundle selling this, once it gets out of the R&D stage."

Their chat flowed easily, part of reintegrating with him. Sensory input laced with meaning, weaving a comfy fabric around them both. Two of my favorites Two of my favorites-clothes and s.e.x...

An echoing voice boomed suddenly, "Channing? Benjamin? This is Kingsley."

It came as a dash of chilly rainwater on a hot skillet. They both flinched. "Yuh, yes?" she managed.

"Sorry to break in-"

"I'm surprised you can," Benjamin said. "Pretty narrowband, though."

"That's the point of having you up there. I may fall out at any time. All the monster has to do is throw a plasma screen between us."

"Your signal's pretty jittery now," Channing said. "Losing the low frequencies. That checks with a plasma cloak just a little too low in density."

"I'll be quick. Pretty rough here, it is. This signal has to go out on an undersea cable and then through a chain of satellites."

"Everybody okay?"

His hesitation told her all she wanted to know. "As well as can be expected."

"Judging from what I can see," Channing said, "I'd say get away from the Center. There's a tube of plasma flow pinning the islands like a needle."

"And low-frequency electromagnetic stuff," Benjamin said. "I can see it on the displays in front of me."

"We have little choice. Arno's arranged a bolt hole for us if it gets bad."

"Arno must be pretty pumped," Benjamin said.

"Indeed. He wants me to provide interface on this."

"You can see the Eater?"

"No, nothing. It's good at blinding us. But I do know that, using a relay through the Navy, we've started the plasma dumping."

Channing felt/saw/smelled it already-a spike of barium ionization at the nearer edge of the Eater's magnetosphere. Like a puke-green worm eating at a fat blue apple. And the dwindling motes of Searchers who had delivered the barium, zapped by the Eater within moments. But they had worked.

"Think that'll drive it?" Benjamin asked. She could feel him sending edgy, exploring fingers through her sensorium.

"We hope so," Kingsley said. His voice was flat, low-quality, riding a meager trail of bits. "It's been following a slow trajectory outward, and Arno believes this will look like another ineffectual failure of an attack."

Channing said doubtfully, "To edge it around the moon."

"I'll admit, this is wholly conjectural," Kingsley said.

"Like me and my life," she said.

Benjamin asked, "We're sure sure it can't decode these transmissions?" it can't decode these transmissions?"

"They are going under a screen signal. Even if it can penetrate that, we have already laid down a pattern strongly suggesting that you are a feint. So it may very well discount what it can decipher."

"More Waterloo thinking," Benjamin said cryptically. "I still-"

"I SHOULD THINK YOU SHOULD START YOUR DIVE!" Kingsley suddenly bellowed. "Oh, sorry, having transfer problems again. I-"

And he was gone. "d.a.m.n, this setup is rickety," Benjamin said.

"He was right, though. I'm starting."

Red muscle-clenchings down her spine. Quickenings. Abstractions rendered into a cool sort of body language. She sensed one hundred and thirty-four Searchers start their programmed accelerations. Her subsystems updated them every few moments. Furious work seethed just below her conscious perception, a strumming insect-hive frenzy.

Into the whirlpool.

Her astronaut training took over. She quick-checked twenty things in the time it took to breathe out. (Thinking that, the breathing sensation came back on, full.) She wasn't going to survive this, but training is training.

"I love you," Benjamin said.

"Ummm. I love you, too, but, well, love the mind, miss the body."

He chuckled in that old way of his.

The webbed intricacy of the magnetosphere rushed at her. "Here goes."

"Good-"

He had started to say goodbye. There had been altogether too much of that lately. More than enough for a lifetime, and here she was into her second one. She was d.a.m.ned if she was going through this all sober and n.o.ble.

"Got a puzzle for you, lover. Why did kamikaze pilots bother to wear helmets?"

4.

Weirdly colored lightning snarled through the thick air. Kingsley helped some men carry gear out of the collapsed sh.e.l.l of the main building. Through the patter of the unending rain, he heard distant shouts. More bodies were recovered from the adjacent wings.

A bolt came slamming down and narrowly missed-crack! The impact staggered him and shattered a guard station a hundred meters down slope. The shock wave hit like a cuff to the body by a giant hand. He dropped his burden in, of course, the largest puddle within view. The box held ferrex computer memories, delicate stuff probably not aided by immersion. He levered the box up again, getting mud over his jacket. Clothes had long since ceased to matter-he had been living in this suit for two days-but the warning twinge in his back said he was getting close to collapse. Fatigue blurred the mind quite enough, thank you, without the piercing pains to which his rebellious spine was p.r.o.ne.

A communications building upslope disappeared in fire as they loaded the 4X truck. Arno came limping out from the smoking ruins carrying his own two overnight cases with large red DEFENSE GRADE 10 labels. From the look on the man's face, Kingsley decided it was best not to refer to the last-ditch lightning rod screen the teams had run up the night before. Their puny defense had withered beneath the incessant voltages the Eater had somehow concocted above the island.

Kingsley decided that reference to any of Arno's decisions was not on for now. Pointless, anyway. Probably nothing could have aided the situation. Stick to the practical, then, with a straightforward "Where shall we go?"

For the first time, Arno showed both confusion and alarm-in approximately equal proportions. An aide ran up and held an umbrella over Arno, allowing the man time to recoup. After an awkward moment, the aide produced an umbrella and handed it to Kingsley, who gave a polite nod. He was already hopelessly drenched, but the thought was the important thing, Kingsley supposed.

Arno managed, "I'd...I'd say we spread out."

"How can we continue working, then?"

"'Working'?"

"Yes, regain contact with Benjamin."

"Working." The concept seemed to need tossing over in his mind.

"We have to get a new base of operations. Plainly the Eater has targeted us quite well here."

"Working."

"Reaching Benjamin. That is our proper job."

"Was.h.i.+ngton..."

"Forget Was.h.i.+ngton. It might not even exist any longer."

This jab made Arno blink, startling him from his daze. "The comm unit's gone. Totalled. No way we can get an uplink."

"Probably so, but there remain the big dishes up at the top."

Someone shouted at them and then ran off. "'Top'?"

"The observatory complex at the peak of Mauna Kea."

"h.e.l.l, higher up, it'll get even more lightning, won't it?"

"We can't be sure. The Eater must have targeted us very specifically. This isn't happening over at Kona, for example."

"Yeah, the tech boys figure it backtracked on our narrow-beam transmissions. Wish they'd thought of that before."

He spotted Amy working with a medical team. Kingsley called to her and she looked around as if she could not tell where the voice came from. Probably stunned from the thunderclaps and lightning strikes, ears humming. His were ringing as well, but that did not prevent him from hearing the cries of the injured as they were loaded into whatever vehicles could serve. Kingsley waved, did a dance, and she picked him out. Arno was engaged with two of his staff and this gave Kingsley time to embrace her, then just stand together silently beneath the umbrella. He wanted to stay like that, not move an inch, but finally he asked her about the observatories. As always, she knew far more than he expected.

When he got Arno's attention back, he said, "The last anyone heard, the system up top was working."

"It's d.a.m.ned vulnerable up there," Arno said, blinking rapidly. Was the man faltering? Not surprising, really.

"Benjamin's going to have no backup," Amy said flatly.

"I can't think what we could do..." Arno's voice trailed off and he stared through the rain at the milling personnel and wrecked buildings, his empire flattened.

Amy said crisply, "If we can get some of this gear up to the data processing facility at the peak, we can use the bands above 100 gigs."

Arno shook his head slowly. "I still don't see-"

"The Eater's holding a plasma discharge over our heads here. We go up to fourteen thousand feet, we're above that."

Arno rallied enough to jut his chin out. "Until it finds us there."

"Until then, we can still talk to Benjamin," Amy said.