Jack Chalker: Priam's Lens

Now, though the trio, worn out, barely able to think, was nearing the summit of the pass. A few hundred more meters and they’d be on the other side, able to rest, as protected as they could be under the circumstances. Now they did find that last bit of adrenaline, and they started to move fast.

Leading, almost at the very top, Harker was struck by a flickering pastel red tendril of energy from the base.

“Gene!” Kat screamed. He was suddenly frozen in place. Then he turned and started looking straight at the base, where new sounds began to pulse, sounds like they hadn’t heard before. Like electronic whistles punctuated with a twanging noise, and the tendril seemed to be pulsing in time with them.

Kat Socolov fought down panic and summoned up rage. She raced up to the zombielike Harker, hauled off, and punched him in the jaw with every bit of strength she could muster.

He went down, and the tendril broke off and seemed to flail away in midair for a moment, then began a new pattern to see if it could find him again.

By this point Kat and Spotty had dragged the unconscious Harker back into the underbrush and out of a direct line of sight with the base.

This was as far as they were going, that was clear. Whatever was going to happen, they couldn’t drag the man that last measure to and over the top. They could only hope that he had been merely tagged and that the aliens had not yet received any data they could understand or use.

It was only a single plate for a genhole that would have been assembled in space out of such plates and that would have eventually been large enough to swallow a full-size spaceship, but the mentat thought it was sufficient and they weren’t going to argue with such a machine.

The trick was to get up on the catwalks and pound on one end of the damned thing so that it was in position to do maximum damage. The giant crane had been frozen in place for decades and could not be powered up. However, to minimize potential damage it held the plate at just one central and balanced point. That point, effectively a ball joint, did not want to move after so long, but Littlefeet was very strong. He managed to budge the thing, much to his surprise and delight.

“The direction is now within acceptable limits,” the mentat told him. “It won’t strike dead center, but it will strike the main complex and it will do damage. You’ve done very well, my boy.”

“I’d like to see it,” Littlefeet told the computer a bit wistfully. “I’d really love to see it hit the demons. Nobody has ever seen demons die.”

We do not know what will happen, or even if it’ll work like this, but I agree with you,” the mentat told him. “Besides, perhaps there should be someone to sing the legends of Colonel N’Gana’s grand last stand.”

N’Gana was keeping himself going by sheer force of will. He was a dead man and he knew it, but he was not going to die of a heart attack just before the final blow.

Littlefeet was confused. “What do you mean, `sing the legends’? I shall be in heaven with the others.”

“I have been thinking about that,” the mentat told him. “And I have been dwelling on a people who, reduced to nothing, nonetheless retain all that is good in humanity. Duty, honor, courage… These are rare things that get obscured or forgotten by modern life. And love as well. I cannot really know that emotion, but the observable qualities make it a central part of all the rest that is good and perhaps holy in people.”

It paused, as if listening for something in the silence, then continued.

“There is a great deal of additional activity up there. I am getting surges of power radiated into the old power grid at levels that are almost off the scale. They know something. I had hoped to give the others another few hours, but I do not think we can wait.”

“Then this is it?” Littlefeet asked, nervously steeling himself.

“Yes, this is it. I do not think you have much of a chance to survive this close in, but you have twenty minutes if nothing else happens. Go! Use it!”

He stood there a moment, uncomprehending.

“Go, I said! You may barely make it out! Stay low and in the culvert! Do not look at the demon palace until after you hear us shoot! The shot may blind you. But, as soon as they shoot, run like the very devil!”

“But—but you said I may—”

“If you don’t start now, you will die here! Go! I give you a chance, however slim, at surviving! By the time you get into that culvert it won’t matter what they pick up! Move!”

Littlefeet started to say something to the two who remained, but N’Gana just smiled and pointed to the catwalks.

Hamille raised its bizarre head and croaked, “Get the fuck out of here, you asshole!”

Littlefeet started running.

They had been on Hector long enough now that Juanita Krill was beginning to worry that they might run short on some supplies before anything happened below. The temporal shift was always in the minds of those who planned this expedition; new air generators, water reprocessors and traps, and fresh food should be coming in by small automated shuttle on a regular basis now, but the timing to pick up the modules and get them to Hector was dicey.

Van der Voort and Takamura didn’t care. They were in a kind of heaven in the place, with a whole new area of physics suddenly open to them, a whole new kind of mathematical approach to problems involving genhole communications. There were years of work here done by large teams of brilliant people and state-of-the-art artificial intelligence agents as well, work virtually forgotten in the slow lethargic collapse of The Confederacy. Years more of work would be needed to figure it all out, to document and test each and every revolutionary idea, but the potential here was mind-blowing. Nobody, but nobody, had been able to lick the temporal shifts of the genhole, but this came very close.

Equally stunning had been the recordings of the initial tests of the weapon based on the effects from Priam’s Lens. Asteroids shattered, a small moon literally sliced in two… Incredible power, power that had terrified those who had built it. What purpose, they’d asked, to kill the Titans if at the same time you destroyed Helena and all upon it as well? There was hope, they argued. There was no other way. There had to be another way. It had gone on and on until the great white spacecraft of the Titans appeared in-system and the power was sucked dry and there was no way left to get down to the surface and get the codes and transmit them back up.

It must have haunted George Sotoropolis most of all. He had been the main roadblock, and he had been here, unlike the other two, to see the ships come in, to understand that he could have hit the ships before they devastated his beloved Helena if he’d just let them have his part of the code.

It was such a simple problem to solve, at least on a theoretical basis. The data stated that the bursts had to be incredibly short. No more than three bursts on a target, no more than thirty nanoseconds per burst, and you kept the damage localized, focused. And the best part was, you only had to hit the target, not necessarily dead center or in a vital area.

The computer models said it would work. They had spent several days running programs through the Control Center command and control computers and they had a ninety-seven percent certainty.

Only nobody’d had the opportunity to find out for sure. By the time they’d determined it, they had already been essentially overrun.

They also knew that Helena’s installations and Titan ships and bases had to be first. They had to take them out and quickly. They had to do it right the first time, and they had to do it without any serious damage to the planet or the moon they were on would no longer be held in a planetary grip.