Heaven's Fall (30 page)

“Cool,” he said, trying not to be sarcastic. “What does the cone do besides make a pretty shape?”

“It literally bends space.”

“Okay,” he said, not entirely sure that he understood that—or accepted it.

“The ring accelerates subatomic particles to hypervelocities. When they collide with certain other particles, a . . . distortion is created. A wave of particles.”

“Sounds very quantum.”

Kate nodded so slightly that it was impossible to know whether she agreed or thought he was teasing her. “This . . . wavicle”—she smiled, pleased with her coinage—“somehow compresses or distorts the structure of space. Think of it as taking two ends of a flat tablecloth and bringing them together. You still have all the fabric, but you’ve connected the ends.” She smiled broadly now, pleased that she remembered an important lesson.

“And once we’ve made this connection?”

“Oh, objects can move from one end to the other without taking the long way around.”

Whit smiled. “We’re back to why.”

“One possibility is to send material from one world to another without using spaceships.”

“What, it just opens a door in the universe?”

“That would be a simplistic and, uh, incomplete way of describing it.”

“I bet. Considering how power drops off the farther you get from the generator . . . ”

“If you’re picturing some cone of empty space stretching across the galaxy, don’t. The cone is only effective to a distance of several thousand kilometers. It creates . . . and here I’m using English-language terms for concepts that are not only mathematical, but Aggregate math. It creates a . . . well, a transition.”

“That isn’t remotely helpful,” Whit said.

“It’s the best I can do. I can tell you that more than a thousand Aggregate cells are currently mapping the transition.”

“How can you speak about mapping something when it’s all theory?”

Now Counselor Kate’s smile, formerly warm and helpful, became faintly indulgent, as if she had exhausted her patience. “It’s a theory that the Aggregates have been . . . pondering for five thousand years.”

“Let me get this straight,” he said. As he tried to shape his feelings into words, he couldn’t help seeing the wide eyes of his fellow field-modelers. Their thoughts were clear:
Better him than us.
“This ring or cone causes some kind of transition or disruption in space so large that you could send something solid through it?” He had read about experiments, pre-Aggregate days, that postulated the superluminal—faster than light speed—transfer of information.

But
objects
?
Living things?
Not according to the physics he’d studied.

Counselor Kate killed the image. She was suddenly more serious, less like someone trying to sell soap or jewelry. “I’m not saying that is the purpose. It’s one of several theoretical possibilities.”

Whit stared at her. He suspected that any further questions might elevate him to a suspect category, but what the hell: “What is that countdown clock?”

“It’s pointing us all toward what we call ‘First Light,’ which is an all-up test, and ‘Fire Light,’ which is the time when the whole cone is ready to go online.”

“‘First Light’ is only five days from now!”

“Yes. The whole project was accelerated in the past few months.” She smiled brightly. “It’s why you and the others were transferred from your other jobs.”

“So there’s no time to waste.”

“Very perceptive, Mr. Murray.”

When he was allowed to step out for lunch, Whit found Randall Dehm already sitting on top of a lunch table in the sun, dark glasses on his face, the remains of a sandwich on the table next to him. “Join me.”

“You’ve already eaten.”

He slid off the tabletop. “I can eat more.”

And, as Whit ordered a wrap and a drink, Dehm did the same. “Walk with me.”

“I only have fifteen minutes.”

“Then eat as you walk.”

Dehm led him to the edge of the platform, where a railing separated them from a drop of ten stories. “What do you see out there?”

Whit squinted. In the foreground were other buildings, including his residence. The usual electrical and environmental support required for a desert facility. One thing immediately struck Whit as odd: Site A wasn’t more than five years old, yet everything looked as though it was falling apart. There were bricks missing from walls, various bits of weatherstripping and UV protection already peeling from windows, walls that had never been painted and looked as though they never would be.

Had the Aggregates gone cheap on Site A? “I see a big bunch of run-down buildings.”

“Well, that’s because no one expects this place to be permanent,” Dehm said. “But beyond that.”

Whit blinked. What he could see was a vast open space that seemed to be filled with dun-colored vehicles in a variety of shapes and sizes. It reminded him of the one remaining automobile lot in Vegas, Auto Land, where he used to see row upon row of nearly identical silvery vehicles.

“This project has created a lot of work for some people. Plants down in Oklahoma and Texas, I hear. Can you imagine building all these things with Aggregates looking over their shoulders? No wonder there’s been no money to build a fucking bridge in this country for the past few years.”

“How do
you
know all this stuff?”

“Everybody who’s been here a few months knows the same thing.”

“But why are you telling me? Charity?”

Dehm rubbed his face. “Maybe I just like to talk. Show off.”

“Maybe you’re setting me up as a security risk.”

Dehm laughed. “I’m not that powerful.” He jerked his head toward the interior of the building. “If you were a risk, the lovely Counselor Kate wouldn’t have been talking to you.”

“Then I just don’t understand—”

“They’re trying to keep you
motivated
, man. You realize you were the top of your field.”

“I realize no such thing.”

“Well, get used to it, while you can. When they moved the clock forward and we had to add staff, they searched outside the college pool for smart folks who were your age or younger. Your test scores and work evals showed that you were ninety-ninth percentile. I’m not saying there’s no one else in Free Nation U.S. who isn’t as good or as fast . . . I’m just saying you were a number one draft choice.”

“And everyone thinks I’ll work better if I know what I’m working on?”

“Well, I do. And so, apparently, does THE.”

“But you’re not them.”

“No.”

“Which takes me back to—”

Dehm extended his arms as if he planned to launch himself off this high building like an eagle. Then he turned. “I don’t trust this project,” he said. “I don’t think it’s good for Americans, and I’m pretty damn sure it’s going to be bad for whoever is on the receiving end of it.

“But I can’t shut it down! And thanks to my own personality traits—I happen to be one of those people who will follow orders pretty blindly without question—I am happiest when things get done.

“So I want this done, over with, complete. So I can go back to California.”

He plucked a coin out of Whit’s ear. “So you know what I know. Can you please just push this project to the finish line?”

“As soon as I finish my lunch.”

Dehm laughed, then walked away.

Whit had actually lost interest in his lunch. Because the sight of all those war machines made him think not about the assembly plants, but about the mines and pits where this raw material had been found. Or the forges or toxic fabrication plants where it had been transformed into suitable material.

His father had been sentenced to one of those places for daring to speak his mind.

However important that was, it was history now, a side issue. Because Whit Murray had put two and two and two-squared together. (After all, he had just received two indications that his calculating skills were superior.) Take this quantum ring and cone opening a “portal” in space, and add this army of badass machines, and you could only come up with one purpose:

The Aggregates were going to invade someone.

The only remaining question was . . . who?

Day Five

TUESDAY, APRIL 17, 2040

Ever since the arrival of the Aggregates, we have assumed that their presence was an invasion, a hostile takeover of an independent nation, a blot on the Constitution, a betrayal of our Founding Fathers—fill in the blank with your standard phrase.

Thousands have died in the service of this belief, or call it a myth. Here we are twenty years later, with unemployment at record lows, student test scores at record highs, no reported racial or ethnic conflicts, and the Cubs finally winning a World Series.

Can anyone say “Utopia”?

Yes, there are still problems: The Free Nation coalition faces threats from without (though it appears we are on the verge of some kind of resolution) . . . and Keanu rises in our night sky, its purpose unknown.

But it seems to me that we all need to step back from our previous positions and ask ourselves if the Aggregates haven’t been a good thing rather than evil?

BLOGGER MINNESOTA SLIM, NEWSNIGHT&DAY.COM

Who wrote this? Some Aggregate? You are a traitor to the human race.

EXCHANGE POSTED 0811 EDT 17 APRIL 2040
EXCHANGE DELETED 0812 EDT 17 APRIL 2040

Fortunately, the small proteus printer did not require a large amount of energy. Working with the pilots, Pav and Chang had managed to scrounge up four batteries for electric vehicles.

It was up to Xavier to get the power from the batteries to the printer, which involved a bit of old-fashioned baring and bending of wires.

But before the plane was two hours out of Darwin, Xavier had managed to get the printer powered up. At which point the real work would begin.

Rachel and Pav had dedicated the entire aft half of the cabin to him.

Zeds helped, though not in a way Xavier would have predicted. The Sentry possessed above-average skill with the proteus and could, in an emergency, have taken over from Xavier in the fabrication of the transmitter.

For the first hours of the flight to Guam, however, the Sentry provided pure muscle, stabilizing the small, light basic printer on its work “bench,” which was actually a pair of hastily sawed boards stretched across a row of seats.

It turned out to be very helpful, because the climb out of Darwin and over the Arafura Sea, and especially crossing Papua New Guinea, was moderately bumpy . . . not enough to have bothered Xavier much had he been strapped in his seat, but vastly annoying when it came to creating connections for wires in order to power up the printer.

The bumpiness was even more destructive once Xavier and Zeds completed the wiring and fired up the printer, because then their job was to feed wads of Substance K into it, removing components for assembly after several minutes of fabrication.

“Fucking goo,” Xavier muttered more than once, each time earning a bizarre titter of some kind from Zeds. (Apparently the Sentry was amused by human profanity, or at least Xavier’s use of same.)

“How’s it going back here?” Xavier looked up, four hours into the flight, to find Rachel holding out a beverage in a bottle and a sandwich. Behind her Yahvi had refreshments for Zeds. As Xavier stood up and stretched—a painful maneuver that made him wonder just how long he had been frozen in that awkward praying position—Yahvi slid past him to sit next to the Sentry. Xavier envied her ease with the giant alien. Although Xavier was friendly with Zeds, he was still surprised and occasionally shocked by the Sentry’s actions.

Maybe you have to grow up with them,
he thought.
Like a dog raised with a cat.
But animals didn’t always get along, no matter how you raised them. People were even worse; true, the HBs seemed to be a relatively peaceful bunch . . . mainly because they shared everything. “Everyone is equally poor,” as Harley Drake liked to say. Not so the citizens of New Orleans; Houston, Texas; and the formerly Free Nation U.S., in Xavier’s experience.