Engines Of God к-1 Page 10

  One of the animals stood quietly by the water's edge. It seemed to be looking directly at her. Hutch stared back. When finally she grew uncomfortable under its gaze, she drew her knees up tight. It raised both forelimbs in what was unmistakably a greeting.

  The warmth of the gesture startled her, as if she'd met an acquaintance in a distant place. She waved back.

  It turned away, scooped a wriggling sea creature out of the surf, dunked it in a wave, and dropped it into its wide mouth. It looked again toward Hutch, with evident satisfaction, and threw several handfuls of water into the air.

  She splashed a little water on herself. But I draw the line at the quick lunch.

  A screech shattered the general tranquility. It echoed off the cliffs. The creatures froze. Then a general rush began. Inland, toward the pass. Several herded cubs before them. One adult went down. Hutch couldn't see what was happening to it; but it was struggling in shallow water, yelping pitiably, its limbs jerking and twitching.

  Hutch raised a hand to block off the sun's glare. And sensed a presence near her left shoulder.

  An eye.

  Green and expressionless. It was mounted on a stalk.

  Her heart froze. She could not breathe and she could not move. She wanted to throw herself into the sea, hide from this thing that had risen beside her.

  The eye watched her. It was the color of the sea. A section was missing out of the iris, rather like a piece out of a pie. As Hutch tried to get her emotions under control, the piece widened, and the iris narrowed. Slowly, a nictitating membrane closed over it, then opened again.

  A second stalk-mounted eye appeared beside the first, somewhat higher. And another beyond those. The stalks moved like long grass in an uncertain breeze.

  During those long, dazed moments, she caught only aspects of the thing that had approached her. Four eyes. A broad flat insect head, to which the eyes were attached. A hairy thorax. Segments. The creature was gray-green and chitinous. Hutch saw mandibles and tentacles and jaws.

  The thing stood on the water, stood upright on a set of stick legs. The shuttles and the pier rose and fell in the light chop, but the creature remained motionless. It seemed almost disconnected from the physical world.

  Hutch fought down her panic. And in a voice surprisingly level, she spoke into her throat mike: "This is Hutchins. Anybody there?"

  "Hutch, what's wrong?" It was Janet.

  "Janet," she said, softly, as if the creature might hear through the Flickinger field, "I'm looking at a big bug."

  "How big?"

  "Big. Three meters." Pause for breath. "Mantis. Squid. Don't know—"

  "Are you outsidel" Janet's tone turned vaguely accusing.

  "Yes." Whispered.

  "Where outside?" There was a hint of anger in the voice before it regained its professional calm.

  "The floatpier."

  "Okay. It's not dangerous. But don't move. Okay? Not a muscle. I'm on my way."

  "You?"

  "You want to hang on while I look around for help?"

  Thick fluid leaked out of the bug's mouth.

  "No," she said.

  The goddam thing sure looked dangerous.

  Hutch was acutely aware of the piercing screams from the beach. She had an iron grip on the guardrail, and could not have let go under any conceivable circumstance. Limbs flexed; three of the eyes swiveled away, came back.

  The Flickinger field wouldn't be much help here, no more likely to protect her against the razor thrust of those jaws than an old pressure suit would. "You may want to hurry," she said into the mike, detesting the whimper in her voice.

  "It's only a strider. I'll be there in a minute. You're doing fine."

  If it wasn't dangerous, why did she have to keep still?

  With her eyes, Hutch measured the distance to the Alpha cockpit. About fifteen meters. She could open the hatch from here by voice control. And she thought she could sprint the distance and get into the spacecraft before the thing could react. But the hatch would need about fifteen seconds to close. Would the beast give her that kind of time?

  The thing touched some deep primal nerve. She would have been frightened of it had it been only a few centimeters tall. "Alpha, open cockpit."

  She heard the pop of the hatch.

  Three of the eyes turned toward the sound.

  "Hutch." Janet again. Her voice flat. "Don't do anything. Wait for me. Just stay put and don't move. Okay?"

  The creature watched the shuttle.

  The shrieks from the beach had stopped. She wasn't sure when, but she didn't dare look away to see what was happening. She was breathing again. Barely. She braced one foot so she could get up.

  She literally saw a quickening of interest in the eyes.

  The jaws twitched. A tentacle unrolled.

  She wanted to look away. But she could not disengage.

  Janet, where are you! In her mind, she traced the steps. The duty officer had probably been at her station, which was less than a minute from the sub bay. Stop to pick up a pulser. Where did they keep the pulsers? The voyage last night from the pier to Seapoint had taken between eight and ten minutes. But Carson had been in no hurry. Surely the sub could make the trip in five or less. Say seven minutes altogether.

  The wind blew, and one of the pelicans flew past.

  How many pictures do you get with four eyes capable of looking in different directions? What is it seeing!

  Why had she come away without a weapon? She knew the drill. But she had never been attacked, anywhere. Dumb.

  One of the eyes rose. Gazed over her shoulder at something behind her.

  "Right with you." Janet's voice again. "We're in good shape." She heard the whine of the sub, and the hiss of an air exchanger.

  The creature was inside the U, separated from the open sea by the dock. It would be difficult to bring the sub to bear against it directly. But that shouldn't matter. Hutch waited for the crackle of a pulser.

  Instead the sub banged into the pier. The stalk-eyes turned away from Hutch. "Okay." Janet's tone changed, acquired the weight of command. "Get away from it. Into the shuttle. Move."

  Hutch broke and ran. In the same moment, she saw Janet leap from the cockpit of the sub, swinging a wrench. The creature turned to face her. Tentacles whipped, jaws opened, and the eyes drew back. Janet, lovely, blond, drawing-room Janet, stepped inside the writhing tangle and brought the wrench down squarely on the thing's head. Green syrup exploded from the skull, and it staggered. They went down together and fell into the water. The struggling mass slipped beneath the surface.

  Hutch gasped and raced back to help. The water thrashed. They came up. Janet grabbed the pier, and nailed it again across one mandible. The thing collapsed into a pile of broken sticks, and drifted away on the current.

  Hutch went down on her knees and held Janet while she caught her breath. When she did, she demanded whether Hutch was okay.

  Hutch was humiliated. "Why didn't you bring a weapon?" she demanded.

  "I did. Brought the first one I could find."

  Now it was Hutch's turn to be angry. "Don't you people have any pulsersl"

  Janet grinned. She was bruised and still breathing hard. Her hair hung down in her face and she was bleeding from a couple of cuts. But to Hutch she looked damned good. "Somewhere. But I thought you'd want me out here quick."

  Hutch tried to check her for damage, but Janet insisted she was okay. The cuts looked minor.

  "Thanks," said Hutch.

  Janet put an arm around her shoulder. Their energy fields flashed. "You get one on the house," she said. "But don't do it again. Okay?"

  "Was it really dangerous?" asked Hutch. "I mean, all it did was stand there."

  The battle ashore had also ended. Several of the furry creatures watched the sea from a rocky shelf well out of harm's way. "These things snack on the beach monkeys," she said, indicating the creatures. "I guess this one didn't quite know what to make of you."

  Kosmik Ground Contr
ol South. Tuesday; 0900 Temple Time.

  Living worlds were exceedingly rare. The reason seemed to be that Jovian planets were also quite rare. In the solar system, Jupiter's comet-deflecting capabilities had reduced the number of major terrestrial impacts to a quarter percent of what could otherwise have been expected. And made life possible on Earth.

  Quraqua, with its functioning ecosystem, its near-terrestrial gravity, its abundance of water, its lack of an owner, was a godsend to the harried human race. It was inevitable that the first full-scale terraforming effort would take place here. This was the Second Chance, an opportunity to apply lessons learned painfully on Earth. It would be home to a new race of humans.

  Idealists had created an abundance of plans to ensure that the children of Quraqua would treat this world, and each other, with respect. There would be no nationalism exported to the stars, no industrial exploitation. Poverty and ignorance would not be permitted to take root. The various races and faiths would live in harmony, and the ideologies that had fostered divisiveness in the bad old days would find rocky soil.

  lan Helm, like a multitude of others, would believe it when he saw it.

  Quraqua might work, but it would be on its own terms. It would never be the Utopia its proponents promised. He knew that. The fact that so many of the people making the Project's decisions apparently did not led him to question either their competence or their integrity.

  Project Hope had not reached the brink of this first phase of its existence easily. Environmentalists had decried the diversion of funds from desperately needed efforts at home; the People of Christ had denounced any notions of moving off-world as not in accord with God's plan and therefore sacrilegious; nationalist and racial activists demanded exclusive rights to the new world. Moralists railed against the annihilation of entire species that would inevitably result from terraforming. There were serious doubts that the political will, or the money, would be available over the long term to ensure even a chance of success.

  Still, Helm was prepared to concede that he had no better idea. Deforestation, pollution, urbanization, had all progressed so far now that various points of no return had been passed. There was reason to believe that if every human being disappeared tomorrow, the Earth would still require millennia to return to what it had been.

  There was a positive side to all this: Helm had built a lucrative, and satisfying, career out of his specialty. He was a planetary engineer, had got his degree in the late sixties, when only astronomers were thinking seriously about the stars. He had done his graduate work on the Venusian problem, where estimates for creating a habitable world ranged into the centuries. (Mars, of course, was out of the question, since there was no way to overcome its crippling light gravity.)

  Nok was a second candidate. But it was inhabited. And while there was a movement that favored settlement and exploitation of that garden planet, nonintervention would continue for the foreseeable future.

  One more reason why Project Hope had to be made to succeed.

  Almost forty percent of Quraqua's water was frozen at the poles. The initial phase of Project Hope was directed at releasing that water. The oceans would fill, new rivers would spread across the land, and, with proper management, climate modification would begin.

  Helm often reflected on the fact that other men had controlled more sheer firepower than he, but none had ever used it. No one had ever made a bigger bang than lan Helm would deliver when, in three days, he activated his arsenal of nuclear weapons, and on-site and orbiting particle beam projectors. Even Harding, at the other pole, would be outclassed. This was true even though the reconfiguration systems were allocated equally. But the ice sheets in the south were unstable atop their narrow strips of land, and the ocean floor was saturated with volcanoes. Helm believed he could coax some of the volcanoes to contribute their own energy to the effort.

  The caps were to be melted simultaneously. No one was sure what might happen to rotation if weight were suddenly removed from one pole and not from the other.

  Helm returned to his headquarters from a field survey at about the same time Janet Allegri was taking a wrench to the strider. He was satisfied with his preparations, sanguine that the ice sheets would melt on signal.

  He drifted in aboard his CAT, circling the half-dozen red-

  stained shacks and landing pads that made up Southern Hope. The snowfields rolled out flat in all directions. The sky was hard and clear, the sun beginning to sink toward the end of its months-long day.

  He descended onto his pad, climbed out, and cycled through the airlock into the operations hut.

  Mark Casey sat alone among the displays and communications equipment, talking to his commlink. He raised a hand in his boss's general direction and kept talking.

  Helm sat down at his desk to check his In box. He could overhear enough of Casey's conversation to know that his Ops officer wasn't happy.

  Casey was a tall, narrow, spike of a man, hard and sharp, given neither to superfluous gesture or talk. His thin hair was combed over his scalp, and he wore a manicured beard. His eyes found Helm, and signaled that the world was full of incompetents. "Another dead core," he said, after he'd signed off. "How was your trip?"

  "Okay. We'll be ready."

  "Good. Everybody's checked in." Casey scratched a spot over his right eyebrow with an index finger. "If we keep burning up cores, though, we'll have a problem. We have one spare left."

  "Cheap goddam stuff," said Helm. "Somebody in Procurement's making a buck."

  Casey shrugged. "It's forty-five below out there. Amazes me anything works."

  An electronic chart of the icecap was mounted across the wall opposite the airlock. Colored lamps marked nuke sites, red where weapons had been placed inside volcanoes, white where placed within the ice sheets themselves, and green for those locations where teams were still working. There were five green lights. "Anything else I should know about, Mark?"

  "Jensen called in just before you came. They've been having equipment problems too, and she says she's running behind. About eight hours. It's not on your board yet."

  Helm didn't like that. His intention was to be set up and ready to go with thirty hours to spare. That would allow time for things to go wrong and still leave a decent safety margin to extract the teams. Jensen directed the 27 group, which was tasked with sinking a nuke into the ice on the far side of the pack. Eight goddam hours. Well, he could live with it. But if it got worse, he would have her head.

  He thumbed through his traffic. One message caught his attention:

  TO: DIRECTOR, NORTHCOM DIRECTOR, SOUTHCOM CHIEF PILOT

  FROM: DIRECTOR, PROJECT HOPE SUBJECT: ADMINISTRATIVE PROCEDURES WE ARE INVOLVED IN AN ENDEAVOR THAT IS BOTH UNPRECEDENTED AND COMPLEX. STATUS REPORTS WILL NOW BE UPGRADED AS PROVIDED IN MANUAL SECTION 447112.3(B). REQUESTS FOR SPECIAL ASSISTANCE WILL BE CHANNELED THROUGH OPCOM AS PROVIDED. WE STAND READY TO HELP WHERE NEEDED. IN ADDITION, ALT. DETONATION PROCEDURES ARE TO BE DESIGNED TO PERMIT INTERVENTION UNTIL THE VERY LAST INSTANT. ACK.

  TRUSCOTT

  Helm read it through several times. "You see this, Mark?

  'The very last instant'?"

  Casey nodded. "I've already sent the acknowledgment." "She knows we built that in as a matter of course. What the hell is this all about?" "Got no idea. I just work here. CYA, probably." "Something's happened." Helm's eyes narrowed. "Get her on the circuit, Mark."

  Melanie Truscott's image blinked on. She was in her quarters, seated on a couch, a notepad open on her lap, papers scattered across the cushions. "lan," she said, "what can I do for you?"

  Helm didn't like Truscott's regal manner. The woman loved to flaunt her position. It was in her smile, in her authoritarian tone, in her refusal to consult him before formulating policy or issuing directives. "We're ready to cancel at a moment's notice," he said.

  "I know." She closed the notebook.

  "What's going on? Is somebody putting pressure on us?"

  "Corporate is concerned
that one or more of Jacobi's people may refuse to leave by the deadline. They want to make sure nobody gets killed."

  Helm's temper flared. "That's a goddam joke, Melanie. They might try to bluff, but you can be damn sure none of them wants to be there when that wall of ice and water rolls over the site."

  "That's not all." Truscott looked worried. "I talked to their pilot. She says something big is happening, and it sounds as if they may be cutting it too close. We've picked up some of their traffic which implies the same thing."

  "Then send them a warning. Remind them what's at stake. But for God's sake, don't back off now. Do that, and we'll never be rid of them. Listen, Melanie, we can't just go on forever like this. The climate here is hard on equipment, and the goddam stuff isn't much good to start with. We put a hold on this operation, even for a couple of days, and I won't guarantee everything's going to fire in sequence." Casey raised an eye, but Helm ignored him.

  "Can't help that." Truscott rearranged herself, signaled that the interview was over. "We'll comply with our instructions."

  When she was gone, Casey grinned. "That stuff isn't top of the line, but it's not really coming apart."

  "A little exaggeration is good for the soul. You know what's wrong with her, Mark? She doesn't know the difference between what management tells her to do, and what they want her to do. Caseway's covering his ass, just in case. But he wants the job done. If this thing doesn't go on schedule, Truscott's not going to look so good. And neither am I."

  "So what are you going to do?"

  Helm stared out the window. The sky and the ice pack were the same color. "I don't know. Maybe I'll make her a good manager in spite of herself."

  Truscott knew Helm was right. The son of a bitch wasn't worth the powder to blow him to hell. But he was right. She had known it herself, had always known it. They won't move voluntarily. They will have to be pushed off.

  Damn.

  She punched Harvey's button. "When you have a minute," she said.