Injuring Eternity (2 page)

“
Oh my God… no real-time
comms?” he said.

“
Turned to powder, sir.”
Vittori was collecting herself now.

Matthews stepped up beside
McDonald. He had retrieved the
G-rail and
shut it down. Removing the
depleted power pack, he handed it to his stunned
boss,
and said,
“Are you all right, Sir?”

McDonald turned to
Matthews. “I want that fucking thing in the vault with all the
power
packs, and then
get your ass
on
a shuttle and
assess
the damage.” He
looked back at the hangar opening. “Take Hearn with you. No
discussions over the radios. It’s all monitored by that
god-forsaken
AI.”

McDonald
stepped
through
the grav-
wall
into the hangar. Matthews followed reluctantly.

McDonald took off his
helmet and scratched his nose. Eyes
lowered;
he said to Hearn, “I think I
just killed Emerson, Tyler and Garcia at the comms
station.”

“
They were all
stupid
assholes
anyway,
” Hearn said
indifferently
as he admired
the weapon. “Tyler was a mole for the Chancellor.”

***

“
Emerson,
Tyler,
and
Garcia are confirmed dead. They all had
full-time
comm link
HUDs,
and they
all flashed off at the same moment,” Vittori said. “Even worse, we
have lost the Quantum Entanglement Synchronous Transmitter,” The
two of them were alone in the control center, and she could not
meet McDonald’s gaze. “No real-time two-way comms with Earth,” She
felt responsible.

Good,
he thought to himself. He was going to blame her in his
report
anyway
. He looked forward to her efforts to avoid that blame. She
was fit, had excellent grooming, and
was...
durable.

“
I want a status report
ready for conventional transmission in thirty minutes. I’ve already
sent a burst transmission reporting that we are not
dead
and that
the prisoner is secure. I do NOT want any of the Chancellor’s ships
in my sky. Is that clear?” He was leaning on her hard.

“
Sir… Tom. I’m sorry.” She
finally looked up. The cold professional scientist was gone. Her
eyes welled with unshed tears.

McDonald placed a hand on her
shoulder. “I know. We’ll sort it all out later. In private.” He
paused, squeezing her shoulder. “We don’t have the bandwidth on the
secondary comms, so don’t send the raw data, but tell them why we
are not sending it. It would take 78 minutes to get
there.”

“
Yes, sir.” Vittori was
collecting herself.

“
Vittori… Kristin. I think
we were set up.” He pointed his thumb over his shoulder
at
the base. “I
think that son of a bitch knew something like this would
happen,
and he
did nothing to stop it.” He could see the lie take hold in her
eyes. She had been hoping that somehow it wasn’t her
fault.

He would
“
reassure
” her later in his quarters. Hard and fast.

***

An hour later, McDonald walked into
the prison cell dome.

He was the only one allowed
in here. It was
a pain
in the ass. But it was the only way to keep the
prisoner’s nature, let alone his existence, a secret.

The entire dome was a
simulation of the sky above Detroit. Day and night, in all weather.
In the center of the dome was a structure that McDonald thought of
as an elaborate movie set. It didn’t look like much on the outside,
but it didn’t need to. He entered the façade and walked down a
long
corridor that made it
appear
he was in a dirty
warehouse.

The door slid
open,
and he
entered a large room that resembled the inside of a warehouse.
Subtle clues everywhere indicated that it was in
Detroit.

High dirty windows provided
filtered light as McDonald proceeded to the center, where there was
a huge clear box enclosing an area seven meters on a side.
Industrial lighting hung from the ceiling above
the cell.

There was a man in the box.

A thin mattress and a
neatly made bed lay on an elevated section. Opposite, a tabletop
was attached to the wall, beside a stump of a stool that rose from
the floor. In one corner, there was a basic toilet and sink. The
entire thing
hovered
above the floor on three clear legs.

McDonald climbed onto the visitor’s
platform that was near, but not touching, the cell. He pounded a
button on a console there and the freestanding screen that showed
stupid sitcoms all day went dark. Another button activated the
intercom and Tom wasted no time in punching it.

“
You fucking knew this
would happen. People died, you bastard.” McDonald maintained
control with effort.

“
But it worked. Perfectly.
Didn’t it? I felt it.” The prisoner looked over at McDonald. “How’s
the wife?”

“
She’s sure as hell not
going to be happy about all the overtime I’m going to have to put
in as a result of this fuck up.” McDonald sounded like he might be
about to lose it. “As if the goddamn commute from Boston to this
shit-hole, wasn’t bad enough.

“
You will tell me how to
fix the
G-rail
spread,
or I swear to the
Dali-fucking-Lama that I will keep you in the dark and not feed you
for six months again. No clean clothes, no water, no vids, no food
and no heat. You will love the winter here.” McDonald was
growling
by the
end. “Maybe a new bullet hole every day for
good goddam
measure!”

“
Okay, okay… relax.
We
are almost
done
. Bring the design up on the big
screen.” He turned towards the black screen.

“
Don’t you tell me to
relax,” McDonald growled as he activated the monitor and brought up
the design schematic. “You bastard.”

“
Remember the version 9.3
that we scrapped. Bring that one up.” The prisoner waited
patiently as
McDonald brought it up.

“
There. Why? That design
was a nonstarter. No way to house the dampeners.” McDonald
remembered. It had only been two years ago.

“
Look at the emitters –
just the business end of the muzzle. They adjusted based on the
power settings. Is any of this coming back?” He was so smug about
it. McDonald could already see how it could work,
automatically
as
well as
manually. It would focus the
G-rail
emission.

“
Why didn’t you tell me
this before, asshole?” He spat.

“
Now you can see their
usefulness as remote fixed-position emplacements.” He turned to
McDonald and stood
to move
directly to the wall of his cell. “I bet it
wouldn’t even fire without a fresh power cell at full power. You
now know that,
as a rapid target
acquisition rifle,
the max power setting
should be a two or three at most. Say emergency power as high as a
four if you are going
after
armored vehicles or buildings. At two it will
take out any armor with ease and last for 300 shots.”

“
What are you leaving out?
I know you’re leaving out something, so give it up now or I swear
it’ll be cold and dark in here by nightfall.” McDonald was dead
serious. The prisoner could tell.

“
Never fire one of these in
the
atmosphere
above power setting Two. The sound volume and concussion
would be
…
a problem.” He said it like he was giving away a secret. “And
never from a moving ship in a gravity well.”

Too late,
asshole.

***

A new QUEST comms unit arrived four
hours later. It must have been seized from a base on Saturn
somewhere by the soldiers that delivered it.

“
Chancellor, he has no idea
we know who and what he is.” McDonald paused. “And what he is
capable of.” He swallowed hard. “Temporal physics is not my
best
field,
but he still lets things slip. He can only see the future
that happens
before
him, in his field of view. It is possible to
deceive him. The best example is how he lets things slip about my
wife. Things he couldn’t know. Because they
are lies
.”

“
Oh? Tell me.” He
was thinking
as
he sat. He was not looking into the camera.

“
We can, in fact, lie to
him. But only if he never finds out the truth in the future. I have
not seen my wife for nearly two years -- the entire time I have
been on Rhea. He has no idea how I
really
feel. It’s been the best two
years of my life.” McDonald needed sleep
badly,
and he forgot himself for a
minute. “She is such a cow and a shrew.” He shook his head to clear
it. “The point is, the prisoner has only ‘predicted’ the lies I
have fed him. Or will feed him.”

“
You have done an excellent
job, Tom. I may take care of that little problem for
you as
a bit
of
a bonus.”

***

Vittori was very grateful
that she had not
been
thrown
under the bus. Very.
Grateful.

It was trivial to make the
modifications. The final prototype
was recalibrated
with the new lower
power maximum. The new
automatic
Choke
worked perfectly. It could even
be overridden
so
you could intentionally create a wide field of mayhem.

The Chancellor of Earth
ordered him
to bring the prototype
and the final design for the fabricators
to him personally
.

It was an
eight-day
trip
back to Earth if he didn’t spare the fuel. He would be home just in
time for Christmas.

ETA, December
24,
2631.

It was three days after the
Solstice 31 Incident. Upon arriving, he was forced to dock at
Freedom Station or be shot down. It was there that he discovered
that the Chancellor of Earth had
been assassinated
by the very same man
who had killed 115 million innocent people. He also learned Rhea
base
was gone
by then as well. Something had gone horribly wrong
there.

Everyone thought he was
dead.

He paid cash for a locker on the
station. Now he understood why these people liked their freedom and
privacy so much. He locked up the rifle and the Rhea AI module he
carried and went in search of the nearest bar.

He needed a drink.