Jack Chalker - Priam's Lens

They had the initial targets picked and locked in using the genhole gates scattered around the system. As soon as any of the gates activated, it would be pinpointed by the Titans, but they would be harder to reach than they seemed, spitting an unknown but deadly stream.

They had the targets all mapped out, and the order. All they needed was the go codes. If it all worked, if they were still alive, still viable when it was over, and if at least one master genhole gate were still intact, then they could turn their attention to other conquered worlds. Not all, of course—there hadn’t been time. But there were a lot of targets out there. Targets that, the early data suggested, against all plausibility, could be automatically hit by commands that would somehow arrive very quickly indeed.

Van der Voort had been working on how that could be so, since it defied established physics. The key, he was certain, was in the properties of whatever that string or stream or whatever it was that the holes captured and transmitted. It had to be something unlike anything they had ever seen before, something that, somehow, took its time from both ends of a wormhole simultaneously without breaking up.

Those earlier scientists had tried to determine the nature of this strange phenomenon coming from the small lens and its trapped and looped singularity. The strings were not true strings; they simply resembled them in the way they registered on instruments and the way they seemed to move. They had no measurable mass, but if they were energy, they did not register as such on any known measuring device. But they were as destructive as hell.

Quite rapidly, van der Voort had come to a conclusion that a number of long-dead project scientists had also considered, but put aside for the more immediate engineering problems.

“Not strings,” he told Takamura. “Not matter at all, or energy, either.”

Takamura frowned. “Not matter and not energy? No mass, no energy transfer, yet destructive. What can you mean?”

“I think they’re cracks,” he told her. “Cracks in the very fabric of space-time emanating from the collapse of the boltzmon. Because it is caught hi a loop, the cracks heal as quickly as the thing cycles, and the forces in our own universe aid this to maintain integrity.”

Takamura saw it at once. “And since the genholes create holes in our own space-time fabric, it is a natural attractor and conductor of the cracks. They don’t heal inside! They’re maintained! Inside, the crack expands instantly but is held inside the field! Yes! Oh, my! That’s why it shattered planets, and could possibly destabilize stars! Nothing could withstand it until it healed over. Whatever it struck, even if it were a hair-thin sliver, would fall instantly out of space-time itself. Oh, my! I can see now why they were so afraid to use it!”

Krill had been adamant about that. “We will not hesitate again! There won’t be a third chance! When we get those codes, we shoot! And the consequences be damned!”

Littlefeet thought he wasn’t going to make it. The entrance was just ahead, but he’d slipped and fallen several times in the rubble. Now, though, he was determined to come out, even into the darkness lit only by an alien glow. He had been given a second life, and he was not going to forfeit it lightly.

“Colonel?” the mentat called.

“Yes?”

“You are still here?”

“I have no place else to go,” he responded, chuckling.

“You were murmuring unintelligibly. I was worried.”

“You needn’t be. I was just seeing a lot of faces all of a sudden, as if a large crowd of men and women stood with us here. It was quite strange. I knew them all, too, and they knew me. I can still almost make them out in the gloom. Soldiers, mostly. Good people, the finest. Everyone I ever ordered to their deaths. It’s almost a reunion, really. They seemed quite pleased to see me, and not at all holding a grudge. Not anymore.”

“I do not—”

“Let Colonel have who he wants here!” Hamille croaked. “Bigger the crowd for the end of the contest, the better the sporting victory!”

The mentat started to say something more, then decided not to. It did not understand what they were saying or thinking, but its logical brain also understood that whatever it was was now irrelevant. If it made it easier for them, so be it.

“They’re running traces on the energy leak,” the mentat told them. “Hector is in the sky, a bit lower than I would like for optimum accuracy but it will do. I am transmitting the codes now!”

The colonel smiled and looked into the darkness.

° “Send them to hell for me, Colonel,” Sergeant Mogutu called from the shadows.

The colonel raised his hand unsteadily and gave the victory sign.

A tremendous surge of energy sprang for less than three seconds from a point near the cliffs just beyond the old spaceport area. Almost immediately three egg-shaped craft of the Titans raced from the complex and zeroed in on the exact spot, focusing their energy drains first, then opening fire with full blasts of energy until the entire area for half a kilometer square was turned first red, then white hot, liquid and bubbling.

Their reaction time was incredible; they were at the spot in under ten seconds and had it reduced to molten rock within a minute.

Much too late.

The command and control board suddenly lit up with hundreds of fully active targets. It so startled Takamura that she failed to act for several seconds. Then it dawned on her what she was seeing and she screamed, “ Krill!”

Juanita Krill was awake in an instant; she walked swiftly to the board. Van der Voort was not far behind, yawning.

“Take it easy,” Krill told the nearly hysterical physicist. “So far we’ve only received the codes in a broad beam. They still don’t know that we are here. To do that we’re going to have to power up our genholes and read in our optimum targets. Takamura, let me take the controls. Any of us can initiate the sequence on the bases but I’m going to have to take the initial ships manually until the command and control AI unit can get the hang of things and go automatic.”

She sat in the chair and pulled the command helmet down on her head. The whole system was now within her purview, a three-dimensional model that, unlike all the other times they’d done this in modeling, now glowed with both active targets in order and potentially active gates.

She had been prepared to wait until she had at least some of both continents of Helena in view, but she found that she didn’t have to. They were both there, although she’d lose one within forty minutes.

Well, she thought to herself. All this time you’ve played your security games and fooled with your codes and computer systems and let others fight and die. Now the whole thing is in your lap, Krill. And the only companions you have can’t help you because they don’t even believe in God.

“I’m powering up five and nine,” she told them. “Here we go!”

All targets hit in turn, order of battle gamma delta epsilon, she sent to the C C computer. Five and nine on. As soon as they are energized, fire at will.

Far off, more than a dozen light-years away, a signal came through the genhole to shut down the transfer and divert to a new location. Helena five and nine, in turn, now!

Colonel N’Gana screamed out into the darkness. “God damn it! Why don’t they shoot?”

“Have patience, my old friend,” responded the shade of Sergeant Mogutu. “ It won’t be much longer now ”

“They are firing at the ground not far above us,” the mentat told them. “I think we will miss the final show. Just a minute or two more and they will be through to here, and they will also be finished tracing the energy surges. I am sorry.”