Robert Reed - Mind's Eye

In a booming, confident voice, Kaybecker shouts, “Five minutes! Five minutes!” Then he shakes Callene, saying, “Enthusiasm, Nagel. The war’s won in five minutes /”

“I know, sir.” She attempts a smile, but it looks more like a wince. “I’m optimistic, sir… and excited…”

The homely general feels otherwise. With a decided chill, she remarks, “We’ll be lucky if we can crack their barricades.”

The project’s top physicist—a tiny Brazilian famous for his temper—tells the general, “Nevertheless, sir. In another few months, we’ll have broken them. They won’t have a hole left to hide in.”

The UN can pulverize rebel bases on Mars and Mercury, and obliterate cities buried on the icy face of Jupiter’s moons. Most of the solar system turns relative to the earth, every target eventually passing into view. Except for the farside of the moon, that is. The rebels living there have a ready-made refuge, thousands of kilometers of rock protecting it. Which is why they place their key industries there, and their best people, and why their swift little ships can harass the earth, even when no rational mind expects them to win.

“I pray you’re right,” says the general, utterly honest. “I hope we can melt that entire damned rock!”

The physicist laughs, adding, “What we’re doing tonight, wielding this kind of power… I guarantee, there’s absolutely no defense against it. None.”

“Four minutes!” Kaybecker hollers. “Say it, Nagel.”

“Four minutes,” she mutters. “And counting.”

The yard seems to grow more crowded, more energetic, yet in the same moment, quieter. People find themselves crowding up to the screen. Conversations fall to whispers, if that. When the image abruptly dissolves into an electric snow, no one complains.

“Three minutes to the barbecue!” Kaybecker roars.

Some glare at him. Some grin. When success does come, the research team will be disbanded. Kaybecker will be sent off to some other troubled project, where he’ll use his arrogance and bludgeoning techniques to make others perform. The truth told, the scientists would cheerfully destroy ten thousand worlds, if that’s what it took to get out from under Kaybecker.

“One hundred and twenty seconds!” he cries out.

He smiles, and he doesn’t.

Kaybecker sounds utterly self-assured, yet buried in that same voice is a distinct fear that begins to show itself. His wide pale eyes close once again, remaining closed. “Ninety seconds,” he says, his voice cracking abruptly. Then he gives the poor girl beside him a crushing hug, and, with eyes still closed, he whispers something that the nearest few can just make out.

“I can see you,” he tells her mysteriously.

Callene stares at the spiderweb screen, saying, “I can see you, too.”

Then she adds, “Sir.”

“Always,” he announces. “And I always will.”

As if in pain, Callene flinches. She starts to say something. It’s almost as if she intends to scold him, judging by the way she plants an elbow into his ribs, her face twisting behind her flash-mask, a scalding white anger emerging.

“One minute!” Kaybecker tells everyone.

The captain appears suddenly, pushing in through the crowd, inserting himself between the lovers. Then with a quiet rushed voice, he reports, “Something’s wrong.”

“Isn’t that the plan?” Kaybecker laughs. “It’s supposed to go miserably wrong.”

Callene and the captain glance at one another, horrorstruck.

No one else can guess what Kaybecker means.

“A Jaguar-class hyperplane is en route,” the captain sputters. “From Seattle—”

“Forty seconds,” Kaybecker roars.

“It’s coming here.” The captain shakes his head, taking a half-step backward. “I don’t know why….”

“Oh, it was my idea to invite it,” Kaybecker admits.

The captain stares off into the distance with a mixture of disbelief and cold terror.

“Why do we need a hyperplane?” asks the homely general. “What’s its mission…?”

Kaybecker gives a cackling laugh. “Honestly, I haven’t decided yet.”

The captain is motionless. Is thinking.

Callene rips herself free of Kaybecker’s grasp.

“It is a Jaguar,” the general tells everyone, reading data displayed inside her own flash-mask. “With a crew of three, plus finger-nukes and a full load of fuel. Scheduled to arrive in four minutes—”

“Ten seconds,” says the project manager.

Then after a deep breath, he says, “Five. And four. And three. And hell, you all know the rest.”

The audience remembers why they’ve gathered here. Faces look skyward, up at the half-molten moon. Even as it fires, the orbiting gun remains invisible. Titanic, unseen energies race out of its magnetic barrel. But once the target is struck, a wavefront of plasmas and furious nuclei interact with cold matter, spreading outward, the blast’s sudden glare beyond anything anticipated, or desired, the largest fire ever produced by humans bathing the coastline in a weird pure light that dwarfs the brightest sunshine.

Every flash-mask turns blacker than ink, shielding flesh and living eyes.

Ignoring the panic around him, Kaybecker bends at the waist and licks Callene’s mask, then gives it a kiss, leaving her armored mouth ringed with horse grease and spit.

“What is it?” screams the Brazilian physicist.

“We just shot ourselves!” someone cries out.

The audience is too stunned to move.

“How?” the physicist demands. “A mistake—?”

“Sabotage,” the general responds. “Somehow, the rebels found a way!”

Then she sees the obvious, too late by a half-second, reaching for a ceremonial firearm worn against her belt.

The captain shoots her through her flash-mask.

Her hidden face shatters, dissolves.

Then he turns, aiming squarely at Kaybecker’s forehead.

But Kaybecker is defiant, warning him, “Not if you want to escape, you won’t. You need me, you stupid fuck!”

Night returns, at least for the moment. Flash-masks are transparent again, revealing dozens of soldiers running in a ragged row, running toward their captain.

“You don’t have time,” Kaybecker screams. “That ship will be here in a veiy few minutes, and then what?”

“You tell me. What —?”

“Without my word, they’ll circle,” says Kaybecker. “And when they see a rebel ship trying to slip down to pick you up—”

“What have you done?” the captain roars.

Callene understands. She steps between them, allowing her small hands to touch the captain, telling him, “It isn’t my fault. I don’t know how this—”

“This is why I was late to our festivities,” Kaybecker confesses.

The captain nearly shoots him. He lifts his weapon a second time, a last thread of discipline stopping him. With a sloppy slow voice, he says, “All right. What do you want?”

“A moment of your time, is all. To talk.”

The spiderweb screen comes to life again. The moon is unchanged, unharmed by the latest outrage. But on the earth’s dark face, exactly where Seattle should be, a fountain of scalding white light is spreading, setting fire to the land, twenty million killed even before the blast reaches the Pacific Ocean, forcing those cold black waters to boil.

It was astonishingly easy, letting another shape his words and behavior. In public, Kaybecker was the same man that he had always been. But in private, he eagerly obeyed every demand. And in those rare moments of self-reflection, he was awed by Callene’s hold on him. His own life had been built on manipulating people, using tiny emotions like pride and fear to motivate. But this was more effective. By a long ways. “If I’d had these biochemical tricks,” he told his new captain, “my scientists would have won the war for me by now.”