Chapter Twenty-one
SIGNS AND PORTENTS
CANYONCITY
LASTCHANCECANYON
THEPLANETGLISTER
By wild chance, James Ruthan Verlant V—known to all as Jay—was out on the surface when it happened, trying to see if the most recent solar array failure might be repairable. When the first missile, or whatever the hell it was, went up, he was there to witness it.
The radar caught it first, of course. They’d felt obliged to dust off at least the low-power radar system since the flyovers had started, since the detection of the nanoprobes, buried deep in the info-systems. No one liked wasting the power, but it was plain to seesomething was out there, looking for something else. Since no one came for Last Chance, even after it had been located, some at least speculated that whoever was doing the flyovers wasn’t interested in Canyon City.
Even so, the radar was running, more or less. No one quite knew how far to trust it, after generations of disuse. The operators had to be trained out of the instruction manuals.
And so Bol—Boland Xavier Shelte VI—was watching the scopes, and all of a sudden he saw something big and fast, climbing from the east. Jay heard his voice, loud and excited, on the general work comm loop. “Target! Target!” he called out.
Jay had the array’s access panel open and his head stuck halfway into it when the call came. He pulled himself clear as fast as he could and tried to hunker down under the array, which, by a bit of good luck, had jammed at the full horizontal position, making for ease of access and good overhead concealment.If you could call a jammed array good luck, considering how starved for power we are, Jay reminded himself, even as he ducked down. Everyone had agreed it would be best to stay out of view of the flyover craft if at all possible.
“Where is it, Bol?” he asked.
“Ah, out of the south, moving fast, a bit north and east but mostlyup —ah, Jay, it’s not like the others,” Bol replied in a calmer voice. “Not an aircar. Moving too fast, and nearly straight up. Some kind of rocket or missile. I’m showing it at ten kilometers high already, and accelerating.”
“Arocket ?” Jay only knew about the outside world from what he read in the histories; but from all he ever saw, you didn’t use a rocket except if you had to boost off the surface of a planet with atmosphere, and even then only if you couldn’t possibly avoid it. Otherwise, you used reactionless systems. Less power per second but massively more efficient.
“Yeah, still heading up. It’s gonna get out of our range real soon. I’m gonna try and flip to visual tracking. Stand by.”
Ten kilometers up, well to the south and headed for space. It wasn’t looking his way. Jay straightened up and stepped out from under the array. He looked to the south, and spotted it almost at once—a flame-bright dot of ruby light, climbing up into the black-purple sky, reaching for the zenith.
It was only because he was looking that way in the first place that he saw the other one—the one headed the other way.
It was no mere dot of light, but a fiery yellow streak, blazing out of the sky, diving for the south.
It flashed below the southern horizon, and, mere seconds later, there was a sudden bloom of light from the same direction. Jay stood there, transfixed and astonished, unable to understand what he was seeing. A life spent almost entirely underground had left him with little practice in interpreting the appearance of things far off, but it was more than that. These things were not just strange, they were unheard-of.
The ground trembled, ever so gently, under his feet, and, long seconds afterward, a low, faintboom echoed its way into the helmet of his heater suit.
“Jay—Jay—are you there? Please respond!”
He suddenly realized that Bol had been hailing him, over and over. “Yeah, yeah, I’m here. Did you track the southbound one?”
“I did, more or less, but it was moving too fast for my gear to get good readings. And you shouldsee the seismograph readings. It’s going nuts. What the hell justhappened ?”
“I don’t know,” said Jay, “but Ithink that something came out of the sky and hit, real hard, somewhere near where that northbound object came from.”
“Butwhy ? What’s going on? What can you see?”
“I don’t know. There’s still a sort of glow on the southern horizon, but it’s dying down.”
“What about the other one?”
Jay looked up into the sky. “Can’t see a thing,” he said, still straining his eyes. “Lost to view. Did the optical tracker pick it up?”
“For a wonder, yes. Still has it, too, headed almost exactly straight for the zenith. It doesn’t look like it’s trying for orbit at all. It’s just going—”
There was a sudden blast of light, high in the sky. “What the hell!” Jay shouted, and instinctively raised his right hand to shield his face.
“Jay! The optical tracker’s flipped out! What happ—” Bol’s voice suddenly cut out, died altogether, just before a roar of static came over the heater suit’s headphones. Then that cut out as well—along with the hum of the suit’s ventilator fan. Jay spun around, looking toward the main access structure, just as every light in the place died. He checked the status display on his suit’s left forearm—and found himself staring at blank displays. His suit was dead. The radio was dead. And it looked as if Canyon City had just died as well.
Fear swept over him—but then he forced it back. Only clear thinking could keep him—keep all of them—alive. Jay forced himself to calmness.
He had spent his whole life convincing machinery and computers and ArtInts to keep themselves going. He’d never seen a failure thismassive before. But maybe that was a good thing. If there was one big problem causing all of it, maybe—maybe—there was one big answer as well.
Or else this was, at last, the inevitable day when Last Chance Canyon would write the final chapter of its history. Every Last Chancer knew that there would be such a day, sooner or later. “Not today, there won’t be,” Jay told himself.
First things first—get inside and get the hell out of the heater suit, and meet up with Bol and Yur and the others. They would be working the problem already. Jay’s suit was of course well insulated. He had plenty of time to get back inside before he would start to lose appreciable amounts of heat. Probably bad air would be a problem sooner. But there was no sense wasting time. He moved a little faster.
Not today. Last Chancers had been promising that to themselves for generations. So far, Jay reminded himself, they had always been right.
Then, the lights bloomed on in Main Access just as he reached the door, and he allowed himself a sigh of relief. They had fixed as least part of it. Maybe itwouldn’t be today.
The miniflyer was getting close to its target. All was going well. But that only left Jay to wonder what other surprises might be out there. There had certainly been enough of them already—even if, two days later, they understood them better.
Jay had always been the history buff of his generation, the one who read the old stories about the outside world, and, occasionally, found something in them that might conceivably be of use in Canyon City. It was for that reason that he couldn’t stop kicking himself. He should have recognized the cause of the massive power cutoff.
He had read about it more than once: an electromagnetic pulse, a side effect of some high-altitude nuclear explosions. Gamma rays from the nuclear weapon produced an electrically charged field in the atmosphere that in turn sent an electrical power surge through virtually every electric circuit under the blast point. The pulse had tripped virtually every circuit breaker in Canyon City—and in Jay’s heater suit. For the most part, all they had to do was to reset the breakers. Some components had gotten fried, but nothing crucial seemed to have been damaged.
But it still remained to find out what the hell had happened—and whether it would happen again, and if so, what it might do to Canyon City the next time.
They weren’t going to have much luck studying the explosion itself. Between the pulse’s scrambling their power supplies, the severe limitations of their optical systems—as Bol put it, a pack of mole people didn’t have much need for telescopes—and the intricacies of orbital mechanics, there was almost no hope at all of locating the blast point in space, let alone doing a good examination of it. Besides, that had been a nuclear explosion. How much was going to be left?
The ground strike was another story. The seismograph data was good enough to allow a close triangulation of the blast epicenter. They could find it. They could get to it. And they were doing just that—carefully.
Their maps showed an abandoned domed-over habitat exactly where the seismic data said the impact had been. Bol’s admittedly rough and inaccurate backtrack of the outbound missile’s trajectory indicated a launch from the same place, or very near it. What records they had had told Bol and Jay that their ancestors—not some figurative and vague ancestors, but their great-grandfathers, the men they had been named for—had done a gleaning survey of the site decades before and found it stripped clean, like everything else within easy reach of a surviving diehard city.
The miniflyer they sent in was one of Bol’s improvisations, cobbled together from the scavenger heap. Three other miniflyers had gone out already. They were all flying in circles at maximum altitude so as to provide line-of-sight over-the-horizon relay linkages with the sensor-equipped flyer.
Bol was controlling all four vehicles. The relays weren’t hard to handle. He just had them set to fly tight circles over given points on the map. But the spyflyer was another question. He was flying it by remote control, using the forward camera view being transmitted back to guide him.
“Be gentle with her, Bol,” Jay reminded him. He stood behind Bol, watching the view from two hundred kilometers away. “We can’t afford to lose her.”
“I know, I know,” Bol muttered. “But name one thing wecan afford to lose.”
Jay smiled at that. Last Chancers were pack rats, and they knew it. They had to be. They needed everything because they had so little of anything, and needed all of it to fix something else. All that they owned had been built up out of whatever scraps they had scavenged and saved, just in case.
And they didn’t have much in reserve. Even putting four miniflyers in the air had represented a major expenditure of resources—but for once, there was no debate as to whether it was necessary. Whatever it was had just come close to killing them all. A larger electromagnetic pulse would have done more than trip circuit breakers. It would have fried half the wiring in Canyon City. If it happened again . . . Well, there was just no two ways about it. They had to know more.
And they were about to find out.
“Coming up on it,” Bol announced, quite needlessly. Jay could see the display as well as he could. And, therefore, could see the still-smoking wreckage as viewed by the miniflyer’s cameras. And they could see what had been scattered by the blast.
“Devils in hell,” Jay said, half in a whisper. “Look at all that. Justlook at it.”
“I don’t believe it,” Bol said.
“I do,” said Jay. “I believe in every scrap of it.” Hehad to. He knew, far better than Bol, or most of the others of his generation, just how close to the edge Canyon City was. He had known ever since the last windmill failure that it would take a miracle to keep them going much longer. But there, spread out below the miniflyer, he saw their miracle.
To any other eyes but those of a diehard, the scene would have been one of complete devastation. But Jay and Bol saw manna from heaven, raw materials and finished articles of all sorts strewn about the surface.
It looked as if the incoming missile had smashed into a dome, a big one, and explosive decompression had done the rest. The dome’s outer shell had been blown to bits; whatever had been inside the dome was strewn across the landscape.
What it had scattered were jewels beyond price to a diehard’s eyes. What looked to be high-end long-store ration packs, the sort normally only broken open at feast days—were strewn about the landscape. Jay’s mouth watered at the thought of eating something, anything, besides what the processors put out. There were enough packs just scattered about down there to feed the whole colony for a month. And clothing—coveralls and work suits and warmgear of all sorts, in all sorts of colors—some still clean, some caught in a bit of mud or debris, some with burn damage but still good. Even the worst of the clothes made what he was wearing look like rags. Other goods, other things he could not readily identify, had been thrown about as well.
Some more massive items hadn’t been scattered by the blast. A stockpile of construction supplies—girders, cables, sheet metal, welding gear—would be enough to repair all the windmills, with spares left over. Vehicles—not spare parts or broken-down wrecks, but what appeared to befunctional ground transports and earthmovers. He spotted what looked like an industrial-size power generator.
And all that was just the beginning. Access ways to lower levels suggested that this dome was like most—a smaller surface facility, with far more storage and living space below ground. There would be more down there, and most of it in far better condition than the stuff caught in the dome when the missile hit.
It seemed obvious that people had been living there, and very recently. But neither Bol or Jay gave the least thought to survivors. No one could have survived that impact. Besides, diehards couldn’t afford to worry about outsiders. The Canyon City saying that meant something like “Leave well enough alone” was “Save one stranger, and you’ll kill five cousins.”
It was pretty obvious that these strangers had been the ones who had launched the missile that had caused the electromagnetic pulse effects at Canyon City—and the overflights and nanoprobes made it pretty clear that they must have known Canyon City was there. The missile launchers plainly hadn’t been worrying too much about Canyon City’s welfare. If anyone down therewas still alive, they weren’t going to get much help at the hands of Canyon City folk.
“We’vegot to get in there, Jay,” Bol said. “Full gleaner team.”
“Gleaner team, hell. We need a full expedition. We need everyone we can spare over there full-time, setting up camp there, figuring transport routes, standing guard on that place. We have to get to it before some other city does.”
The odds were good that other nearby diehard outposts—if there were any that still survived—would investigate the explosion as well. If Canyon City got in there first, and showed that it was able to defend what it had found—and, perhaps, hide or remove the best stuff fast, before anyone else could see it, that might dissuade others from making a try.
But the devil himself forbid if two or three diehard cities tried to stake their claims simultaneously. That was what set off diehard wars. The thing most likely to kill off a well-established diehard city was a resource war, a bread war, with another group. Such wars often killed off both sides.
If someone else got there first, even with just a small contingent, the wisest course would be to abandon all claim to even so tempting a prize—but who could be that wise? They had to get in therefast before that danger arose. They couldn’t risk war or the conditions that might lead to war. A fight could rapidly escalate, until both sides had consumed resources—and lives—worth far more than what they were fighting over.
But what diehard could see what Jay was seeing, and not want to fight for it, no matter who was in possession? There was a saying for that, as well, that meant something along the lines of “Better safe than sorry” or “Don’t risk what you can’t afford to lose.” It went: “Wealth starts wars, but poverty ends them.”
Well, there was wealth enough down there, just scattered about on the surface, to start a dozen diehard wars.Get in there first, Jay told himself,and all our troubles will be over.
But if they got there second, he knew, then their troubles would have just begun.