“Uh, boss,” Connie said hesitantly, “you’re the one that’s gonna be in the crosshairs on this and you’ll pay the price if anything slips. Don’t you think you should ride Guard on this?”
“No, and I’m not being heroic. If anything goes really wrong, I want to be where I can do a quick fix in a hurry. If anything goes radically wrong, then I’d rather be dead out there than have to face the powers that be here and explain the situation.”
“Thanks a lot,” Mickey commented sourly. “So I’m standing there with the apple on my head instead. Look, at least Connie should be Guard.”
“No, I want the most experience with these monsters in the field, and she’s worked hard enough that if all fails she’ll have a convenient getaway. You’re just riding Guard, Mickey. They won’t want your scalp, only ours.”
“We’re gonna have to travel between sixty and a hundred kilometers from here just to get into position,” Connie noted. “There’s no roads, and there are gullies and canyons all over the place and lots of standing water. Even if they can get a few of those waterlogged electric cars going and charged enough for a full hundred, it’s unlikely that we can make it over that terrain just in the preformed areas. How are we supposed to get there? We’ve got nothing around that flies, and even if we did, I’m not sure we could trust it in this turbulence.”
“I know. Even moving at their maximum speed of five kilometers an hour, sixteen hours a day, it’s going to take the big amps two to three days to get there and get into position. I’ve already talked to Logistics and they don’t have enough charged and operating cars for local needs right now and it’d take me days to get authority over their heads. The only solution we’ve been able to come up with is that Security’s been using horses to patrol the area.”
“I know,” Mickey remarked with an upturned nose. “I’ve stepped in enough of it. Uh, oh—you don’t mean—”
“Yep. Now you know another reason why I picked the people I did. All of you Overriders have some experience in horseback riding, as I do.”
“But I haven’t been on a horse in seven years or more!” Billy protested, and several others nodded agreement.
“I haven’t been on in longer than that, and my muscles already ache at the thought of a long ride without strengthening, but it must be done. Somehow I will beg, borrow, or steal five horses and saddlebags and enough rations for a week, even if I have to get Seventeen to make them for me.”
“Nix, boss, it ain’t gonna work,” Connie told him. “As soon as you get sixteen and a half kilometers in, you’re gonna be on the basic form—almost no water at the start, no water at all farther in, and no grass or anything else for the horse to eat or drink. Horses can’t go that far without both, and I don’t think they digitized any ready, willing, and able camels, even if we knew how to ride them.”
He sighed, knowing she was right but hating to see his idea go up in smoke. “O.K., then—I guess I go see Colonel Singh.”
But Colonel Singh was not in, and as much involved with the problems the rains caused as everyone else. One of the Security sergeants suggested that he see the local commander of Signals, and he headed down there.
Major Irene Craig was a tough, no-nonsense military type, the daughter of two officers and granddaughter of one more. She looked and sounded like the kind of person who could get things done, but Haller preferred to work with her rather than for her. He quickly explained the problem and the urgency to both her and her top sergeant, who listened attentively.
“We’ve got a lot of experience working in this kind of environment.” she told him when he’d finished. “The problem here is unique, but every one of the Anchors has had emergencies of one kind or another, some worse than this.
Two possibilities come to mind. First, is there any way that your crawlers could stop periodically and the operators use the big amp, coordinated with you here by radio, to create water and hay stations as they go? They can’t have gotten too far as yet.”
He shook his head from side to side. “No, I thought about that. There’s at least one assistant on each team to aid in setup, but they’re not rated for Overrider status, and the equipment’s pretty specialized.”
Major Craig sat back in her chair and thought for a moment, chewing on a large unlit cigar. Finally, she said, “Then the only other efficient way would be to exit the bubble and ride down entirely in the void. Your north point can make it overland O.K., but east, west, and south will have to ride the void, if they’re willing to do it.”
“Huh? Why wouldn’t they? They’re good people.”
“The void does some funny things to folks who aren’t conditioned to it. It can—change you. Some people have gone nuts in it.”
“Your own troopers go through it all the time,” he noted. “We can’t get any supplies in from the Gate except overland.”
“That’s true, but we have an extensive training period with new people before we send them in, and even then nobody’s totally immune—they just are a little better at it, that’s all.”
“We’ve been working in Flux since we started this. I think we can handle it.”
“Maybe. You’ve been working on the Anchor pad, which was partially created by the machinery when it created the initial bubble. You’re working on Flux within Flux, as it were. This is the pure stuff. You’re right on the grid, with not even a good layer of rock and dirt to insulate you. First there’s disorientation, then a total lack of grounding for all the senses. You’re lost in a deep, dense fog with absolutely no guideposts or landmarks. We’re laying the route marker strings using sophisticated navigation gear linked to the satellites, and it still feels like the middle of nowhere. You lose all sense of time, and your mind plays tremendous tricks on you. And we don’t have any routes yet laid out southbound on either side, so it’ll be necessary to tie in to an elementary navigational system, which means using the grid itself for orientation.”
“I think we have to risk it,” he told her. “There doesn’t seem any other way, and I don’t think we can stand more than one more storm like the one we just had. Still, I can’t see how going down the void will help matters any. There’s no food and water there either.”
“Sergeant,” Craig prompted, and the sergeant nodded, went out, then quickly returned with a small hand-held device.
“That’s a Three Seventy-Eight Stroke J Flux Converter,” the major told him, “often referred to by the troops as the ‘god gun.’
Haller looked at it, never having seen or heard of it before. It was a rather small brown rectangle from which came a thick pistol grip and two large triggers in parallel. There was an elaborate socket in the base of the grip, but no other outward markings, not even a barrel or contact points. “What’s it do?” he asked her.
“It was developed by and for Signals by our own laboratories,” Craig told him. “It is proscribed to all others, including Security, although I’m sure that one could be built and the programs developed for it if it was needed or they were desperate. It’s a tool, Dr. Haller, nothing more. It permits us to survive out there in the thousands of kilometers of void. I’ll not go into its exact operation, but it is basically a link to the computer grid. It contains a series of preset programs which can be sent to the nearest computer on the network and elicit immediate execution.”
“Without an Overrider or Guard?” He was shocked.
“Yes, without either, but don’t worry about it. since the programs are in the gun, and the only thing it does is activate a preset routine from the maintenance programming. It is to a corpsman what canteens are to a desert nomad, or a rifle and snowshoes to the arctic explorer. We will send two teams. One will take you and one other of your party down one side, while the other will take the two others down the other side. Your north point engineer can make it entirely through finished Anchor.”
He nodded. “Fair enough. But what about me? I have to get to the center of the bloody wasteland.”
“You’ll have to make it in yourself, but I’ve looked at your diagram. If this were a perfect circle, your best bet would be to press due south and forgo the void altogether, but it’s not. It’s irregular, and your center point is skewed well to the south and west. If you try it overland inside the bubble, you’ll have perhaps a hundred and twenty kilometers to go—a fair amount without food or water for the horse, and chancy at best. If, however, you go in from your west point, here, the distance is just a bit more than half that. Your horse should make it that far, and you with it, or at least close enough so that it wouldn’t be much of a walk. If you make it, then I assume your machine should be capable of providing for you and the horse. You should arrive at about the same time as the north point is reached by your other personnel.”