“They shot themselves!” someone cried in amazement. Alex scanned but found no signs of damage. No earth tremors. The foe’s resonators still shone on-line, as dangerous as ever. This was weird.
“Effects!” he demanded. But the question stayed unanswered—why would the enemy have fired beams at themselves? Beams which apparently did nothing?
“Do they say anything?”
Comm ops scanned. “Nothing. They’ve gone dead.”
This is too strange, Alex thought. Something bizarre was going on.
“Alex!” Teresa cried out.
Jesus, she’s strong! He winced at her sudden grip on his shoulder. Turning around, he saw her blinking, shaking her head. “It’s happening again. I’m sure of it, Alex. Can’t you feel it?”
He remembered their long passage together in New Zealand, down twisty avenues of Hadean darkness, relying on her fey sensitivity to find a way back to the world of light. That memory left no room for doubt. “Battle stations!” he cried as he reset the instruments, searching.
There! On yet another side band—Beta seemed to throb angrily. “Load all capacitors! Give me a counterpulse at—”
He was interrupted as somebody screamed. Only a dozen meters away, a man went goggle eyed, tore at his hair—and blew up.
Strictly speaking, it wasn’t an explosion. The poor fellow stretched, still screaming, till he shredded like gooey taffy. In sound there was little more than a wet pop, but the colors … a rainbow of brilliant liquid shades spilled forth as the skin peeled back, gobbets of flesh flying in all directions.
An aura of shimmering lambency seemed to hang midair even as the ruin of meat fell to the floor. That man-sized apparition hovered for a moment and then began moving rapidly in a horizontal spiral.
Men and women yelled in dismay, scrambling to avoid it. But the terrible focus accelerated, striking two cooks who chose that unlucky moment to leave the kitchen carrying lunch. Their tureens flew as arms and heads ripped from their bodies, spraying those nearby with scalding soup and crimson blood. They never knew what hit them before the disturbance swept on, catching victim after victim.
“Everybody out!” Alex cried redundantly amid a panicky rush for the exits. He paused only to grab his plaque and Teresa’s hand before joining the stampede. Halfway to the open doors, however, she braked and suddenly wrapped her arms around him. “Wha—?” He cried, struggling. But she held on, fiercely immobile as something horrible and barely visible brushed by them, passing through space they would have occupied.
“Now!” she cried when it swept on. Alex needed no urging.
Outside he saw no order to the evacuation. The Tangoparu crew were excellent and brave. They had faced dangers more powerful than any warriors had since time began. But courage is a useless abstraction when the mind recoils to a primitive state. Men and women ran pell-mell, scattering across the windblown hillsides, some running straight for the seaside cliffs. In one blinking instant, Alex saw a technician touched glancewise by something no more visible than a pocket of air. She whirled, screaming as some tide seemed to suck her into a roughly man-shaped refraction. Her horror ended in a shuddering gasp, and she crumpled to the ground hemorrhaging from purpled, blistering skin.
“This way!” Teresa shouted, dragging Alex’s arm. They fled westward, though Alex had no idea why.
Several more times Teresa suddenly veered right or left. On each occasion Alex obeyed at once, following her zigs and zags like they were commandments from God. Close brushes with death grew too numerous to count, and he stopped wondering how Teresa knew which way to dodge. Sometimes he noted a close passage only by the sudden shiver down his back or by a threatening rise in his gorge. Then, before he could respond to the horror, it passed and they were off again.
There wasn’t time to react to the sight of friends and colleagues being horribly murdered in broad daylight, under azure Pacific skies … no effort to waste on anything but flight. Numbly, he felt the crunchy unevenness of grassy slopes suddenly give way to the harder pounding of shoes on concrete. There were blurry images of parked jets and zeppelins. Was she going to try to grab one of those …?
But no. Teresa yanked him past the waiting aircraft and toward another object—black on the bottom, white on top, and streaked with dross. Up a set of rusted, rickety stairs they clambered, to fall at last inside a dank, dusty chamber.
The space shuttle, he realized dimly as he fell to the deck, wheezing. So Teresa hadn’t any plan after all. Blind instinct must have driven her as much as the others. Only in her case the compulsion had been to seek out “her” spacecraft—a totem of safety and her own sense of control.
“Come on, Alex.” Sudden, sharp pain lanced his shoulder as she kicked him. “Move it!” she shouted. “The thing could pass through here any minute!”
That was true enough. So why hadn’t they stayed outside, where her acute senses might be helpful, rather than hiding in this useless coffin?
He let her drag him to his feet, though, and stumbled after her through the fetid airlock, tripping over the high sill. She virtually threw him the last few meters into the shuttle’s dim, cavernous cargo bay, where he stumbled to his knees under the glitter of two small spotlights. The beams converged in a pool of brilliance where he met his own dumbfounded reflection, as if staring into a magic pool.
Alex blinked once. Twice. And then he understood.
It was a perfect sphere which glistened his own image back at him, sweeping around into infinite concave vistas. He cried an oath. He’d forgotten about the other resonator!
Alex looked down at his left hand, tightly gripping his portable plaque. And he still wore the subvocal! Maybe …
But no. “Damn!” he cried. “We haven’t got power. The idea’s no damn goo—”
He cut short as the sphere’s gimbals suddenly hummed, rocked back and forth, and then steadied at a prim angle. Microprocessors chuckled and clicked.
“What do you think I’ve been doing since you saddled me with that great beast?” Teresa asked. Alex stared at her, so she shrugged. “Well. It helped pass the time. Now, come on! Here’s a display unit I ripped off a while back. No holo, just flat screens. But you can plug in there.”
Alex knew his jaw gaped open. Shutting it, he could only say—“I love you.”
“Damn straight.” She nodded quickly. “If you save our lives we can talk about that. Now stop fucking off and get to work!”
He turned around to face the archaic control unit, plugging in and loading his control software, using the subvocal to begin a startup sequence, sparing only a moment to shoot one final look her way. “Bossy wench.” he muttered affectionately.
She said nothing, but her eyes offered more confidence in him than he’d ever had in all his life—so he decided he had better try his best.
There are buildings that look like charnel houses—one out on the open tundra, one in a desert, one undersea, and one perched on an island bluff under the shadow of dark statues. Within each chamber, towering cylinders still vibrate, rotating within their delicate cages. Nearby, however, no living creature stirs. The walls are streaked with blood.
Those who built the cylinders are gone, but power still flows at the whim of electronic spirits. Computers process ornate programs, casting forth bolts of energy, tickling wrath from far below. Each machine sings the new song it’s been taught … a song of death. Death spirals outward from the target areas, hunting fatal resonances with bipedal beings that are so numerous, they aren’t hard to find in dozens, hundreds, thousands.…
This doesn’t go on uncontested. Cautiously, brave soldiers approach each site, though daunted by gruesome things they see along the way. Over radio and Net they hear of like horrors beginning to take place in cities far away.
Terrified but determined, the soldiers grimly attack—only to be struck down by something unseen,-intangible, unstoppable. Their nimble aircraft switch to autopilot, drifting slowly off course, no longer guided by anything remotely r
esembling men.
Frantic orders pour over secure channels calling for harsher weapons to be readied. But those will take time to unseal and prepare. Meanwhile, the circles of death expand …
• LITHOSPHERE
“Daddy, thank God you came!”
Claire was in his arms before Logan got fully out of the taxi. He squeezed his daughter tightly. “I’m here. Yeah. Hey, come on, sunshine. Don’t cry.”
“I’m not … crying,” she protested through snuffles. But she didn’t draw back until she’d wiped both eyes on his shoulder. When he finally got a chance to look at her, they were red but dry.
It had been months since he’d last visited chez McClennon, when summer’s humid, scented air made for long, lazy evenings lit by lightning bugs. Now there was a bite of winter in the stiff gulf zephyr that whipped the fringe of cypress trees. From Claire he sensed a quivering, over-wrought tension.
He turned to pay the driver, but the man ignored Logan’s proferred credit card. He bent over, covering one ear, listening intently to some news flash coming over his button earpiece, then suddenly cried out in dismay, gunned his engine and took off! Almost instinctively, Logan’s hand reached into his pocket for his own receiver.
But no, he had resigned from the struggles of the world. While his family needed him, the universe could fend for itself.
“What’s all this about your mother locking herself into her room?” Logan turned and asked his daughter.
The wind whipped Claire’s reddish-brown hair. “It’s worse than that. Dad. She’s electrified her whole wing of the house.”
“What?”
“She won’t even answer the intercom, though I can tell she’s busy working in there—” Claire cut short as a yell of pain echoed round the corner of the house.
“That’s Tony,” she explained, taking Logan’s arm. “He was going to try prying a window.”
“Sounds like that worked great,” Logan commented as he was dragged along. “Be nice,” she chided back. “Tony’s good. He’s just never taken on Daisy before.”
Logan came around the corner to see a lanky, black-haired teenager holding one arm and sucking singed fingers. On the ground a screwdriver still smoked around the extra insulation that must have saved the boy from even worse burns. “Hullo, Mr. Eng,” Tony said.
“Hi, yourself,” Logan answered, thinking, So he’s never taken Daisy on before? I’ve got news for both these kids. Neither have I. Not really.
When you come right down to it, I’m not sure anybody ever has.
Out in the real world they try to act against her. Military men take hammers to the peace seals on cruise missiles, desperately bypassing fail-safes, reprogramming the robots to seek sites never named on contingency lists—to fly across widening swaths of no-man’s land and destroy other machines … machines now casting storms of long-range death.
Trying to accomplish so many unprecedented things, naturally, the men make mistakes. They seek targeting information through the Net and so give away their intentions. Forewarned, Daisy swings her deadly beams to slice through military outposts, clearing them of living crews, leaving the robot bombers unmanned and unready.
Of course there are limits to such delaying tactics. Eventually, surviving soldiers will manage to pick off the resonators one by one. Despite the chaos in the Net, some bright hacker will finally decipher the sinuous path of her commands, tracing all of this back to her. Given enough time.
But time is on her side now. With every passing minute, Daisy grows in power. Soon her creations will be self-sustaining, driven by currents in the Earth’s own dynamo. They will be whirling storms of death, as permanent as the weather—scythes of mortality splined and tuned to reap a narrow and specific harvest, humanity.
“Antibodies,” she says, giving biological metaphors to her creations. “I’m making antibodies against a parasite.”
As fabled Nemesis once implacably hunted murderers, so she pictures herself, seeking just vengeance for the slain manatee, reprisal for the long-dead moa, vindication for vanished condors. “Every species needs natural controls, and humans have lacked one far too long.”
There is a proper order to things, she believes. The food-chain is meant to be a pyramid, and every top predator should be rare, its numbers few. Mankind reversed this time-tested arrangement by breeding out of all proportion, creating a teetering edifice, doomed to fall.
“Ten thousand,” she concludes. That would be a good figure. That many humans might remain, out of ten billion, to make a decent world population. This she counts as merciful, since the planet might be better off without the species altogether. But after all, she is a mother. And vile as the race might be, she cannot bring herself to wipe out every last human child.
“Ten thousand or so wandering hunter-gatherers. Maybe even twenty. That’s as many humans as this world ever needed.” Even wrath must be satiable, and so Daisy targets this limit for herself. As the Net fills with rising cries of anguish, she murmurs reassurance that the panicked world cannot hear and would not understand if it could.
“This is for your own good,” she croons. “After all, what life is it for you now, packed into those awful camps and cities, inhaling each other’s rank breath? Never knowing the serenity of wildness that’s your birthright?”
For the survivors, she promises health, clean skies, beauty, and happiness. They will live vivid lives, and her reapers will keep them company all their days and nights.
Oh yes, it will be a better world. And she will stop mercifully, she vows, well before human numbers fall too low.
Mercy, of course, is a word subject to interpretation.
• NÖOSPHERE
Somewhere in the background Alex heard voices and thought other refugees must have come aboard. But that couldn’t be. By now he and Teresa must be the only ones left alive on Easter Island, protected by the thin, passive field of his little resonator. It had to be some news channel then, frantically reporting this horrible new endeavor in extinction.
In parts of Eurasia, the Americas, Africa, the effects were straightforward—no earthquakes, nothing hurled into space. Just death, simply death.
Death of human beings.
It’s actually a rather simple combination, he pondered as his device built a finely meshed picture of events on the gravitational bands. He worked cautiously, so as not to be detected by the enemy network. They’re using parameters that couple perfectly with human flesh, in pocket standing waves shaped to match, tidally, the human figure. I never even thought of that, though it’s obvious enough from earlier data. The clues were there in all those effects Teresa and others felt. It just took a certain mindset to see it.
Wave a beam like that around and you can kill millions. It depletes interior fields so little, it’s potentially self-sustaining.
The first strikes had been surgical, precise, taking out the world’s centers of gravitational research … all possible points of opposition. That included Colonel Spivey’s former resonators, for instance, and the Russian and Japanese and Han stations, too. Most of those were off-line now. Some flickered on idle, with no one at the helm. And two or three appeared even to have been hijacked, joining the original rebel cylinders in spewing beams of death.
It was too horrible to grasp, of course. If he let the full meaning penetrate it would numb him to uselessness, and Alex couldn’t afford that right now.
He tried some tentative pulses to get the feel of the sphere. It was touchy, delicate, like a wild beast. As it spun, it gave off the queerest, brief half images—subtly warped reflections of the spotlights, the looming shuttle cargo bay, his own face.
He hadn’t any chance to get familiar with the resonator since it was lifted, dripping, out of the nanogrowth tank many days ago. Now he had to leap straight into the saddle, without benefit of practice or simulation, from the gazerdynamic equivalent of a dray wagon straight to a rodeo horse.
What he wanted to do was give the bastards a taste of their own
medicine. But without diagnostic backup, that would take too long. Meanwhile, thousands were dying in Tokyo and other places. Something had to be done about that first.
“All right—” he said aloud.
The subvocal mistook his words as commands and sent the sphere precessing in its housing. It took several seconds of concentrated effort to settle it back down again. Jen used to warn him about using the temperamental input device when emotions were running high, but what choice did he have?
All right, Alex thought with silent, iron discipline. Here goes nothing.
She is slicing through Manaus—scouring the cities and towns of the Amazon—when her familiars report yet another band of desperate military men trying to interfere again. Now a squadron of them are streaking toward one of her resonators in screaming hypersonic aircraft, attempting to overcome her guardian whirlwinds with sheer speed and agility, trying to lock their missiles on target before she can respond.
Daisy obliges them in their courage to face death. Tracking their telemetry, she fills their cockpits with blood and grue.
But two aircraft continue on course. Their pilots have succeeded in setting their autopilots in time! She slips into military channels using codes stolen long ago from supposedly secure caches. By these routes she reads the appropriate control sequences—childishly simple—and uses them to take command of the hurtling ships, overriding their literal-minded computers, sending them careening about on reverse courses, bound for their points of origin.
Then it’s back to work. There is so much housecleaning left to do. She’s barely begun her chores. In minutes she has cleared the island of Sumatra, where the few remaining orangutans may now dwell in peace, undisturbed by terrible tall interlopers. No more human hands will wield chain saws there. On to Borneo! Her whirlwinds respond and sweep across the sea.