“She never committed herself to the Knowledge.”
“She’s still a child!”
He gave her an angry cough for a reply. He paced about, brooding, then halted, shaking his head. “Right.
Time we dissolve our band, disperse into the common herd.”
“William . . .”
“Oh, we’ll be in touch,” he said bitterly. “There will be places in government for both us, I’m sure. But a great deal of reconstruction lies ahead.” He knitted his fingers, flexed his arms in his jacket, cracked his knuckles. “That sanatorium will have to go. All of them will have to go.
Right now’s the time to do it.”
The gray woman knew better than to object.
* * *
“This bogie’s a drone?” The sergeant was incredulous.
Efficiently she tapped the coordinates of the approaching helicopter into AARGGS, the anti-aircraft railgun guidance system.
“Story is, it’s some kind of experimental ECM ship that went nuts,” replied the captain. “Ops says the people who let it loose think it’s homing on our ground stations.”
Out on the perimeter of the Space Command headquarters base, batteries of TEUCER railguns bobbed and swung on their pedestals.
“Interceptors can’t catch it?”
“Sure they could catch it. An F-41 could climb right on top of it, look down, shoot down. You seen any of these new army choppers in action, Sergeant? They can fly about three feet off the ground at six hundred klicks. And what’s on the ground between here and the mountains?”
“Oh.”
“That’s right. Houses, schools, that sort of thing. So it’s up to us in perimeter defense.”
The sergeant looked at the radar scope. “Well, in about twenty seconds we’ll know. It’s still coming.” She ordered AARGGS to arm even before the captain told her to do so.
The Snark howled across suburban ranch-house rooftops and backyard swimming pools and rock gardens, across wide boulevards and artificial lagoons, lifting loose shingles, shaking the last dead leaves from ornamental aspens, terrifying pedestrians, raising dust, and leaving muddy recirculated lagoon water surging in its wake. The helicopter’s antennas were continually broadcasting on all restricted and unrestricted channels as it closed on the base, but it received no reply to its urgent communica- tions. The bare flat ground of the base perimeter swiftly approached. . . .
As the helicopter screamed in over the fences, over the waiting fire trucks and ambulances and police vehicles, some observers noted—and later testified—that the craft did not appear to be aiming for the forest of space-directed radio antennas that were HQ Space Command’s most distinctive feature, but instead was headed for the Operations Building, in front of which there was a helipad. It was a fine distinction—much too fine upon which to base a splitsecond decision.
Three TEUCER hypervelocity missiles leaped into the air as the Snark crossed the perimeter. They were no more than shaped steel rods, dead rounds carrying no explosives, but they impacted with the momentum of meteoroids, of flying bulldozers. Two-tenths of a second after they left the launcher they ripped through the armored helicopter. There was no explosion. The disintegrated aircraft simply scattered itself over the parade ground like a handful of burning confetti. The larger bits of smoking metal rolled away like charred wads of newspaper.
III
Sparta waited among the bare aspens on the edge of the frozen field, waited until the buttery light had faded from the cloud-clotted western sky. Her toes and fingers and earlobes and the tip of her nose were numb, and her stomach was growling. Walking, she hadn’t minded the cold, but when she finally had to stand and wait for darkness she’d begun to shiver. Now that darkness had come, she could move in.
She’d garnered valuable information from the Snark before—in that split second when it had paused, hovering motionless inches above the ground, computing new coordinates —she’d jumped clear and sent it on its unprotected way. Precisely where she was. Precisely what day, month, and year it was. That last had come as a shock.
Memories had been swarming more thickly with every passing minute, but now she knew that even the most recent of them was more than a year old. And in the hours since she’d jumped, while she’d been trudging through the snow, she’d contemplated the burgeoning strangeness of her sense of herself.
She grasped, viscerally, that in the past hour—even had she not been indulging in self-inspection—her wild and surging sensibilities had started to bring themselves partially under her conscious control; she’d even managed to remember what some of those sensibilities were for . . . and thus she could better modulate the insistent vividness of her senses—taste, smell, hearing, touch. And her remarkably flexible vision.
But those senses were still getting away from her—only sporadically, but then overwhelmingly. The acid sweetness of pine needles fallen upon snow threatened more than once to overcome her with swooning ecstasy. The melting mother-of-pearl of the setting sun more than once sent the visible world a-spinning kaleidoscopically, inside her throbbing brain, in an epiphany of light. She waited out those intoxicating moments, knowing that in the scheme of things they must recur, knowing that when they did she could, with effort, suppress them. Then she pressed on.
She had a much better understanding of the nature of her predicament. She knew it could be fatal if anyone learned of her peculiarities, and equally fatal to put herself in the hands of the authorities, any authorities.
At last it was dark enough to cover her approach. She trudged across the snowy field toward a far cluster of lights where two narrow asphalt roads, recently plowed, formed a T intersection. One of the weather-bleached wooden buildings had a sign hanging from its rusted iron eaves, lit by a single yellow bulb: “BEER. FOOD.”
Half a dozen cars were parked in front of the rustic tavern, sporty cars and all-terrain-vehicles with ski racks on top. She stopped outside and listened. . . .
She heard the clink and thump of bottles, a cat whining for its dinner, the creak of wooden chairs and floorboards, a toilet flushing in the back, and over all a surround-sound system cranked up just shy of pain level. Under the music —hoarse energetic anger of a male singer, rolling thunder of a bass line, twined sinuous howls of a synthekord doing harmony and three kinds of percussion—she picked out some conversations.
“Rocks and straw,” a girl was saying, “they got a nerve even selling a lift ticket,” and elsewhere a boy was trying to wheedle college class notes out of his companion. At another location—the bar, she estimated—someone was talking about a remodeling job on a nearby ranch. She listened a moment and tuned in on that one; it sounded the most promising— “. . . and this other dolly, blond hair down to there, just standing there staring through me, wearin’ nothin’ but this little pink piece of transparent silk like you see in those department store ads. But like I wasn’t even in the same room.”
“Prob’ly on somethin’. They’re all on somethin’ up there, man. You know that big sensie-mixer they got, that’s supposed to be payin’ for the place? That guy that runs it’s so Z-based all the time, I don’t know how he feels anythin’ . . .”
“But the dollies,” said the first voice. “That’s what impressed me. I mean, we’re walkin’ back and forth carryin’ about one plank of knotty pine panel per trip, right? And these blond and brunette and red-headed dollies are just sittin’ and standin’ and lyin’ around there. . . .”
“Most of the people who come through here, claim they’re goin’ up to rent the studio facilities? They’re just dealin’, man,” the second voice confided. “Just buyin’ and sellin’ . . .”
Sparta listened until she had what she needed. She let the cacophony fade and turned her attention to the vehicles in the parking lot.
She tuned her vision toward the infrared until she could see warm handprints glowing on the doorhandles, the brightest of them only a few minutes old. She inspected the more recent arrivals. Their occupants were less likely to be leaving soon. She peered into the interior of a mud-spattered two-seater; bright outlines of human bottoms glowed like valentines in both bucket seats. A lap robe bundled on the floor in front of the passenger seat hid another warm object. Sparta hoped it was what she was looking for.
Sparta pulled off her right glove. Chitinous spines slid from beneath her fingernails; gingerly, she worked the probes extending from her index and middle fingers into the sliverport in the door on the passenger side. She sensed the minute tingle of electrons along her conducting polymers: images of numerical patterns danced at the threshold of consciousness; the surface molecules of her probes reprogrammed themselves—all so quickly that only the intention was conscious, not the process. As she withdrew her fingertips the probes retracted. The car door swung open, its lock-and-alarm disarmed.