Major Thomas "Bomber" Slade was the S-3 (Operations) officer of the 229th Combat Engineering Battalion (Light, Sappers Lead), based in Fredericksburg, Virginia. The short, stocky, erect officer had arrived three hours before with the main body of the engineering battalion that was tasked with designing and beginning construction upon interlocking defenses to attempt to stem further Titcher incursions through the Staunton wormhole. He was currently observing the wormhole from the front glacis of an M-88 engineering vehicle, that being the only place in relatively short range that wasn't radioactive as hell.
Major Slade was an "active reserve" officer. That is, he no longer held a regular Army commission, despite being a product of the United States Military Academy (West Point, NY). He had resigned his regular commission as a captain to embark on a career as a civilian civil engineer. He had his bachelors in civil engineering from West Point and had attained a masters from Rensselaer Polytechnic in New York while in the United States Army. After serving with the Army in several positions, notably as a company commander of the 82nd Airborne Division's light engineering company, he felt that he had limited chance of eventual advancement to high rank in the regular Army. This was as a result of the incident that had given him the moniker "Bomber" Slade.
As a young lieutenant he had been tasked with clearing a live fire range of unexploded ammunition. His platoon had spent two weeks carefully policing the combined arms' range for unexploded ordnance ranging from small mortar "sabot" rounds, which were about as dangerous as firecrackers, up to five-hundred-pound bombs. They would comb one-hundred-meter by one-hundred-meter segments and put white flags on any ordnance that was detected. Then, when the area was fully surveyed, they would carefully lay small charges of Composition Four on any of the unexploded ordnance, "daisy-chain" the explosives together for simultaneous detonation and then, having removed to a distance considered safe, detonate the charges thereby blowing up the dangerous munitions that had been lying around.
They had done this for two weeks and at approximately three p.m. on a Friday the range had been declared, by Lieutenant Slade, clear.
Unfortunately, Lieutenant Slade was a meticulous officer and he had ensured that only sufficient C-4 had been used on each munition to ensure its destruction. Furthermore there had not been as many exploded munitions as were anticipated. Therefore, there was a large quantity of C-4 left over, approximately thirteen hundred pounds. Once drawn from the ordnance corps, munitions are extremely hard to return, even if it is, as most of this was, in unopened ammunition boxes. It entails vast amounts of paperwork and annoyingly intense questions from various ordnance officers and NCOs who are, understandably, unhappy to have "irregular" munitions in their storage bunkers.
Therefore it was Lieutenant Slade's decision to detonate the C-4 on site.
The careful and cautious manner to do so was to detonate the C-4 in small lots, carefully moved from the site of the central group of material. But it was late on Friday, the platoon had been out on the fricking range for two weeks and everyone was ready to head back to quarters, grab a shower and then hit the bars on Bragg Boulevard. Including Lieutenant Slade. It was, therefore, his decision to detonate the pile of explosives as one lot, a sort of going away present for the exhaustive work of clearing the range.
Being a combined arms' range there were more than sufficient bunkers and trenches at a reasonable distance to ensure the safety of the working detail and the C-4 was placed well away from anything that might suffer undue harm, such as a passing tank. Therefore after rigging the pile to blow, the platoon retreated to the bunkers and Lieutenant Slade clacked the claymore firing device that was connected to the blasting cap by a very long wire.
The explosion was more than thrilling. Everyone had inserted earplugs but several of the platoon complained of ringing in their ears and Private Burrell developed a small nosebleed. Despite that fact the platoon, speaking loudly as was necessary because everyone was at that point a bit hard of hearing, packed up and headed back to barracks feeling that they completed a job well done.
What Lieutenant Slade and his platoon sergeant, a staff sergeant who would later leave the U.S. Army at about the same time as Captain Slade, failed to consider was the method in which wave fronts from explosions propagate. They are, essentially, sound waves. Secondary effects can be mitigated, therefore, by the presence of obstacles, such as the pine trees that just about cover the ranges of Fort Bragg. However, if there is no intervening obstacle they are mitigated only by distance. And it had been a very loud explosion.
The 82nd Airborne Division's quarters are laid out between Ardennes Street and Gruber Road. On the far side of Gruber Road are the motorpools of the division and on the far side of the motorpools are training areas detailed to the various battalions. They begin the vast stretches of training areas that make up the bulk of the Fort Bragg reservation. There are very few buildings other than motorpools on the far side of Gruber. The exception is the division headquarters, which is placed on the top of a hill just about centered on the division. The front of the headquarters, which faces the division, is given over to reception and security areas as well as offices of the lowly in the headquarters. The back of the headquarters is reserved for higher ranking officers. And right at the rear of the headquarters is the office of the commanding general. Behind his desk is a large plate-glass window so that by no more than turning his chair around the general can look out over the vast stretches of land where his troops are busily training.
Thus it was that the commanding general of the 82nd Airborne Division, who was finishing up paperwork for the week and looking forward to a cold martini and maybe a smile from his wife, suddenly found his back covered with glass as a resounding explosion occurred somewhere on the ranges.
Lieutenant Slade was required to reply by endorsement as to his reasoning that led to the commanding general's window being broken. Furthermore, the incident was reflected in his next officer's evaluation. Officers' evaluations are carefully considered reports that bring the term "hyperbole" to a new level. Lieutenants that managed to avoid pissing in potted palms or screwing the commanding general's underage daughter still had phrases in their reports that indicated that they were the next Napoleon, but with higher moral standards. Anything other than such phrases led to officers that were so described being promoted ahead of those who were not. It was assumed that if you were not the next Napoleon, you simply were not Army material.
Lieutenant Slade's next efficiency report had the phrase "sometimes given to acts of less than calculated logic." In a civilian environment that might have been overlooked. But even for a second lieutenant, this was the kiss of death to an army career.
Thus "Bomber" Slade, after an otherwise exemplary career, chose to hang up the uniform, go back to his hometown of Fredericksburg, Virginia, and go to work building apartments and retaining walls in suburban developments.
However, he did not leave the Army entirely. He joined the Virginia National Guard which had its engineer battalion headquarters located in Fredericksburg (one of the reasons he had joined the Army in the first place) and after another company command and staff time was eventually promoted (despite the efficiency report and probably with a helping hand from the West Point Protective Association) to major. He acted for a while as the assistant division engineer then became the S-3 (Operations) officer of the battalion. Life, really, wasn't all that bad. He would have preferred, of course, to have deployed with The Division (former members of the 82nd always refer to it as The Division as if there were only one) to Iraq. But life goes on. And he'd built quite a few nice retaining walls instead.
Then came the gates.
Now he was, unquestionably, doing the work that he had looked forward to all his adult, and much of his preadult, life: defending the United States from attack by armed enemies. They were aliens, of course, but that just made it better. He was a reader of science fiction and aliens were a nice, morally clean enemy. You couldn't get worked up over mounds of alien carcasses. The only post traumatic stress syndrome that was going to come from fighting the Titcher was related to possibly losing.
At the moment, however, the enemy seemed to be unavailable.
There had been reports that a team had entered the Eustis gate and that something had happened there. At the same time radiation counters in the units that had been fighting in Staunton had gone wild. The aliens, who had been pouring through in an apparently unstoppable tide, had suddenly stopped coming through the gate. The remnant, mostly dog-demons and thorn-throwers with a few rhinoceros tanks, had been mopped up by the survivors of the first National Guard company to be thrown in and locals who, like those in Florida, had turned out with everything from hunting rifles to one squad in an old M-113 Armored Personnel Carrier complete with M-2 .50 caliber machine gun.
None of them had gotten close to the gate, however, because the ground was still reading very hot. There had been no explosion, just a sudden jump in the radiation count. And now the gate was acting . . . odd. Instead of a flat mirror it was rippling, reflecting the light in a pattern of every color of the rainbow.
That, however, was not Major Slade's concern. He was tasked with designing the defenses to be emplaced to cover the gate. There were tanks and fighting vehicles dug in on the hill but the division commander wanted a complete and thorough prepared defense with interlocking fire, bunkers, communications trenches and all the rest.
So Major Slade sat down on the front glacis of the engineering vehicle, laid his map across his lap and pulled out a camouflage colored portfolio, unzipping it and opening it to reveal the 8½x11 lined pad therein. Then he pulled a Cross pen out of his left chest pocket and began to sketch, occasionally picking up the binoculars or referring to the map on his lap.
It was while he was examining dead-zones around the gate, spots where direct fire could not be placed on the enemy, that the mecha-suit appeared. It seemed to hang in air, almost insubstantial for a moment but that might have been an optical illusion, then dropped to the ground. It was human shaped, about four meters tall, or would be if it were standing up. He looked at it again and made a moue of uncertainty. He had three children, all boys, and they were great players of computer games when they weren't watching Japanese anime. Major Slade, for that matter, had spent a couple of years religiously reading the Battletech series until it turned to utter dreck. And he damned well knew mecha when he saw it. And as far as he knew, the United States Army did not have any mecha units. If they did he'd turn in his commission and reenlist as a private if that was what it took to join.
The mecha rolled over on its side and seemed to be looking towards the town; there was a small rectangle of what looked like glass on the chest of the suit. Then it lay back down on its back, as if exhausted.
Major Slade pounded on the driver's hatch with the handle of his locking blade knife until the vehicle commander, wearing a gas mask, popped out of the hatch.
"We need to go down and pick up that soldier," Major Slade said.
"What the fuck is that?" the vehicle commander, a sergeant, asked in surprise. It was clear that none of the crew had been watching the gate which, given that the Titcher might appear at any moment, was just criminally stupid. What they'd probably been doing was sitting as high up as they could, fearfully watching the radiation detectors.
"It's a mecha-suit," the major replied, picking up his materials and climbing up the armored engineering vehicle. "One of ours."
The major was not aware that the Army had mecha, but that did not mean that he thought the suit was alien. Oh, he could get his head around some race, as yet uncontacted, having mecha. There were numerous arguments against mecha as a combat system. Joints were much more prone to mechanical breakdown than the simple track and drive wheel system of an armored fighting vehicle. They also had a higher profile than tanks and more surface area to hit. But the major had known that the Army was eventually going to go to something like mecha for infantry. The weight that infantry soldiers were expected to carry was growing every day as more and more "vital" systems were discovered. Properly designed mecha would simply amplify the abilities of the infantry.
Thus another race could be using them for combat, say against the Titcher; one such might have been "sucked in" by whatever destabilized that gate. And he could allow the logic of them being humanoid; covergent evolution and all that. He could even allow the logic of them being vaguely human facially; he had seen the mask sculpted on the "face" of the suit. Although that was pushing the bonds of credulity.
But lying on the ground next to the suit was what appeared to be a cut-down 25mm Bushmaster from a Bradley Fighting Vehicle. He couldn't imagine precise covergent evolution of the Bushmaster. Among other things, it had some real design drawbacks.
Ergo, it had to be a human. Furthermore, it had to be a human from a time sometime near the present. It was probably from the present.
And it was right in the middle of one of the hottest patches of radiation in the world.
The vehicle lurched into motion and he, carefully, climbed up onto the turret and held onto the commander's machine-gun mount as it slowly negotiated the rubble on the hillside.
The mecha had gotten to its feet and was now lurching in the general direction of town. It didn't walk very well; every step seemed to be dragged out of some recesses of energy. And the steps were not graceful at all, foot by foot lurches, arms held at the sides. It had left the Bushmaster on the ground and now plodded its weary way up the hill, one slow step at a time.
It didn't seem to notice the engineering vehicle until they were about fifty meters away. Then it stopped and raised its right arm, waving it back and forth slowly, very much like the droid in Star Wars but slower and with much less enthusiasm. But Slade waved back and motioned for the mecha to stay where it was.
When the engineering vehicle stopped it was within a meter of the mecha. Slade called for a Geiger counter and went forward, waving the wand over the suit. Sure enough, it was hot enough to fry eggs.
"Stay in that," he yelled. He could see a human face peering at him through the armored glass.
He climbed back up onto the turret and ordered them to pick the mecha up with the manipulator arm.
The manipulator arm was a relatively recent addition to the engineering vehicle. It was designed to pick up mines and "Improvised Explosive Devices." It should, however, be able to lift the mecha. If it was even working; the arm was complicated and broke down on a regular basis.
The one on this vehicle was working, though, and it lurched out of its protective cover and jerked creakily towards the suit. The operator, probably the vehicle commander, clearly didn't have much experience using it. But it managed to clamp onto the chest of the suit, lifting it up by hooking under the shoulder.
"Let's get out of the rad zone," Slade yelled down into the vehicle.
He watched carefully to ensure that the suit was not damaged by the movement. But the driver or the vehicle commander had already thought of that and the vehicle backed up the hill, the suit held well off the ground to avoid obstacles, and slowly bumped to the top and over the other side.
The burst of radiation that had come from the gate had, fortunately, been blocked by the hill. Otherwise the vast majority of the defenders would have died of radiation poisoning. But the back side of the hill was clean and there was a decontamination station set up at the base of it. The driver pivoted the vehicle and carried the mecha down to it, where the suit was lowered to the ground in the middle of the road where the decontamination station had been set up.
"What the fuck is that?" one of the decontamination team yelled through his mask. He was wearing a rubber environmental suit that was half covered in suds and had a scrub brush in his hand. The Humvee that he had been working on was sitting in the road.
"Mecha-suit," the major said from his place of approximate safety on the top of the vehicle. "One of ours. There's somebody inside. How do you want to handle it?"
As he asked that the suit rolled to the side then got up on its knees, slowly. The decontamination team backed up and one of the MPs from the contaminated Humvee drew his sidearm.
"Put it away," Slade said. "I told you, he's one of ours."
"We don't have anything like that, sir," the MP yelled.
"That you know of," Slade replied.
The front of the suit opened outwards and a man wearing a black, skintight, coverall stepped out and walked quickly away from the suit, rubbing one shoulder and stretching.
He turned around and waved at Slade as soon as he was well away from the suit. "Thanks for the ride. This is Staunton, right?"
"Right," Slade said.
"I need a secure line to the Pentagon," the man said. "Right after I get whatever they give you for radiation poisoning. Oh, and I could really use a beer."
"We have a report from Chief Miller on the events at the Eustis gate," the secretary of defense said. "We had assumed that you were killed in the explosion."
"No, I was caught in the gate failure," Bill replied. "At that point I experienced some rather unusual communications. I'll make up a report on it as soon as I can with the strong caveat that I'm not sure whether it was real or a sensory-deprivation-induced hallucination. But I think I know what's going on and I've got a pretty good idea how we can get some control over the gates."
"Good," the national security advisor said. "How?"
"The anomaly in Orlando is a boson generator," Bill said, taking a sip of Miller Light. "I mean, that's pretty obvious but I know, now, how it's working. Bosons require high levels of energy to occur. The anomaly is an opening to a realm outside the normal concept of 'universe.' That is, it's not opening to another universe, it's completely open to utter unreality. The reason that we're opening gates to other planets is that linked bosons create stable wormholes through that intermediate unreality. The reason that they're on other planetary surfaces is that they are inactive bosons left over from previous generation. I think that if we looked hard at all the sites we'd find evidence of previous civilizations. Furthermore, the bosons are resonating on a specific frequency. They only link to bosons on that same frequency. I think that's why the Titcher can only get through certain bosons."
"Can I ask you a question off the subject?" the President said. "More of a point of order. It's not normally the case that one of my subordinates sits in a secure communications facility sipping on a beer during a report."
"Doctor's orders," Bill said, taking another sip. "Honest to God, Mr. President. I know that you don't care for it, and why, but I'm balancing health and need. The only thing you can do for radiation sickness is get as much of the radiation out of your body as you can as fast as you can. The most efficient way to move it out is water transfer, drink a lot and go to the bathroom a lot. Beer is even better than water at both. As soon as I'm off the horn with you guys and get a few things moving, I'm going to sit down with a couple of cases and drink them as fast as I can. In the meantime, I'm staying on the sober side. Just."
"Oh," the President said. "In that case, I hope I never get exposed to radiation."
"Your theory that sufficient energy will destabilize the wormholes seems to be correct, by the way," the secretary of defense said, changing the subject. "The Titcher gates, as well as the Mreee gate, have all shut down and generated a blast of hard radiation. I'm not sure why in the case of the Mreee gate."
"Oh," Bill said, taking another sip. "That's because the Mreee are bad guys."
"What?" the national security advisor snapped.
"The Mreee are working with the Titcher," Weaver replied. "They use the same resonance bosons as the Titcher and when I went into the Titcher gate room my environmental system had been breached. I smelled the same smell there that I did at the Mreee gate. I'm pretty sure that just about everything the Mreee told us was a lie, at least about their trying to hold off the Titcher. The gate room, all that concrete, was probably inside a Titcher organism. Not on an island. The island lie was to explain the smell. They're not trying to hold off the Titcher; they already lost."
"Oh . . . damn," the secretary of defense said. "Are you sure? The Mreee took a couple of our officers up to watch the fighting. They were using those blasters to really sock it to the Titcher."
"Disinformation," Bill said. "The Titcher don't care how much is destroyed as long as we left a gate open and undefended. We were even getting ready to send through support that we wouldn't have been using against them at other gates. But, really, how much did we see of the Mreee? Just where they took us with those jaunt belts. Total area a couple of square miles, most of it in buildings or cities. The evidence against the Mreee is pretty strong. I'm sorry I supported them in my initial evaluation. That was my mistake. Fortunately, we found out in time."
"We've got teams over there," the national security advisor said. "From State and Defense."
"They might be just fine when, if, the gate opens again," Bill said. "In which case I strongly suggest that they be 'called home for consultation.' Then again, I'd suspect that they'll disappear in the interim. And even if they didn't, the gate room must have taken one hell of a whack. It was on the same boson track as the rest. That probably transmitted the wave front of particles."
"They've attacked, in some strength but not as much as normal, on another track," the national security advisor said. "The open boson in Mississippi. We're holding them and they've apparently retreated for the time being."
"I'd guess that that was a leftover from a previous civilization on that planet," Bill said, thoughtfully. "There wasn't an organism at the gate so they're having to move them over from wherever they have forces. Which makes the point that we really have to hold them here."
"Why?" the secretary of defense asked.
"We're opening multiple bosons along multiple tracks," Bill pointed out. "The Titcher seem limited to just one resonance, one track; they don't appear to have our version of a boson generator. If they break out on Earth, we're going to let them out across the entire circuit; thousands of worlds they've never been able to touch. And the generator is not going to shut off for thousands of years."
"Oh . . . shit."
The boson in Horse Cave, Kentucky, was quite invisible to the naked eye. The survey team from Louisville that found it, an environmental company again, which normally responded to spills generated by CSX railroad, had had one team member, in fact, walk right through it. It gave off no radiation that was detectable with a Geiger counter. It had no apparent physical presence. But it was giving off a continuous stream of muons.
As Weaver had been assembling the materials he needed for his experiment he had kept one eye on the news and came away with an even greater cynicism than was his wont. The fact that the bosons were generating muons had become common knowledge and it had created a real hysteria, exceeding, if possible, the hysterias about the use of nuclear weapons. Which was far greater than the hysteria generated by invading aliens, although of the three they were far and away the greatest threat. Muons were subnucleic particles. They didn't generate "radiation," they didn't cause cancer, they didn't make two-headed babies. Hell, there are about 10,000 muons per square meter at sea level continuously coming from active galactic nuclei and quasars and other cosmic stuff and that hasn't caused us any problems in five billion years. But try to tell that to reporters.
They had found a slew of so-called "scientists" who had trotted out elaborate . . . lies about the danger from muons and bosons. Did they bother to tell people that light particles were bosons? Hell no! They were based on no scientific evidence, but the falsehoods were much more interesting to the news media than the occasional countering truth from physicists who actually knew what they were talking about. People who had never heard the term "muon" until they saw it on the evening newscast were now running around hysterically trying to find muon detectors and calling up environmental companies to have them come in and check their homes for muons and bosons.
Bill had been at a scientific conference where a psychologist had laid out the theory of hysteria. In chimpanzee society when faced with an overwhelming or previously unknown threat, such as the first time they heard a rifle shot, the tribe would act in a hysterical manner. Some would try to fight, some would run, some would bluff, others would hide or simply collapse. With no way to logically evaluate the threat, the very randomness ensured that some would survive and, presumably, reproduce. It was an evolutionary method to ensure survival.
It was a pain in the ass in humans, though.
And the protests. Oh my God. Rioters had trashed the physics department of the University of California, destroying hundreds of man-hours of work, some of it directly linked to boson research which might have helped fix the anomaly in Florida. Antiscience hysteria was sweeping the nation, hell, the world. The anomaly site was an armed camp now that protesters had decided it was safe to picket there.
In Horse Cave, Kentucky, however, things were placid. The area that the boson had generated on was an open field just up the road from Park, a natural depression, a shallow forty-acre sinkhole, with a stream running through it. The county road had a sign about a quarter mile north that had a horse and buggy on it, indicating that Amish used the area. The county had sent over a couple of sheriff's cars and a few reporters had come down from Louisville, asked him some questions, most of which he'd either lied about or avoided answering by invoking national security, and left. Fortunately they left before the units from Fort Knox showed up.
The boson had been chosen for the experiment for several reasons. The area was rural, well away from major roads, so if the worst happened minimal damage would occur to humans and their possessions. Even if they got a Cthulhoid entity through the gate, the worst that it would mean was having to change the route of I-65 by a few miles. The depression meant that the boson was easily defended. And it was only two hours from Fort Knox which was the Armor Home of the U.S. Army and which had a vast stock of armored vehicles for the Kentucky Army National Guard. A goodly few of them were being arrayed on the slopes around the depression.
"This is a track one site," Bill said to the National Guard battalion commander. "The Titcher attacking in Mississippi are coming through a track one, but that seems to be a world that was held by another civilization; there wasn't a Titcher organism on the far side. So far all the gates they've opened have come from track three. So we're pretty sure that there aren't Titcher on the other side of this gate. On the other hand, it doesn't mean there's not something hostile. On the gripping hand, most of the gates have been neutral. We may not be able to open it. We may find that there's nothing on the other side. We just don't know."
"Okay," the lieutenant colonel said. "When do you open it?"
"As soon as you're in position," Bill answered.
"We're as ready as we're gonna get," the colonel replied. "Blast away, Doctor."
Particle accelerators were delicate things that were normally only found in laboratories. And the rest of the mechanisms involved were even worse, not to mention being hastily thrown together by the team from Columbia. There was, therefore, an inflatable shelter, courtesy of the United States Army, thrown up over the boson.
Bill walked down the hill, which was knee high in grass and covered in lovely white flowers, to where the team was making final adjustments. The equipment also required enormous quantities of energy, which was another reason for using this boson; there was a high-tension power line trailing across the back side of the property. Army electrical power specialists along with some bemused electricians from the local power cooperative had tapped into the line, run it through an Army field substation and trailed arm-thick power cables down to the devices in the tent. They were now all connected and would soon be drawing enough power to brown out the surrounding area.
"All set?" he asked.
Mark Rosenberg was a member of his team at Columbia. The heavyset, just below medium height, brown-haired man was an electrical engineer with a background in the nuclear industry. After getting laid off in a round of cuts he had submitted his resume to Columbia, expecting to end up working in one of their few remaining defense factories. Instead, he had ended up working with Bill doing whatever they were doing that week. The team's purpose, up until the opening of the gates, was finding problems that the U.S. military had and then solutions. It had all been highly classified work which sometimes resulted in major successes but often resulted in minor failures. However, the military had a host of problems it wanted fixed and much preferred to dump them on what were generally called "Beltway Bandits" than detail officers who had real day-to-day jobs to trying to find solutions. Good, problem solving, officers were always in short supply. It made more sense to have them fix those problems that only the military could solve, like figuring out exactly how much firepower to use against Iraqi guerilla forces by trial and error, than sitting in offices trying to figure out how to determine the whichness of where. Occasionally the team's problem-solving skills had a great effect and thus the military felt their money had been well spent. One soldier's life saved was equated to just about a million dollars. The team's output had probably saved, here and there, over a hundred lives if not more.
But since getting the call to go to Orlando, Mark had been on what the military called "the sharp end." He'd suited up more times than he ever did working at Savannah River, he'd watched two nuclear detonations and he'd scrounged more weird materials, from more sources, than he'd ever imagined. The linear accelerator, for example, had had to be hand built on site from parts scrounged from research laboratories and factories ranging from Missouri (at a steel plant) to England (Reading University). And the circular magnetic whatchamacallit, its temporary official name, had started off life as a device to wrap tubes with in plastic. He'd found it on eBay being sold by a company in Seattle that was tired of it jamming all the time. The express overnight shipping had cost more than the machine.
"Probably," he said, checking a connection. "This is the most jury-rigged piece of crap I've ever seen in all my born days."
"It only has to run for a few seconds," Bill replied. "It either will work or it won't."
The boson generated muons in every direction. But by careful study they had found that in one direction, more or less pointed west and down towards the earth, it was generating over one hundred times the output of any other direction. The devices had been aligned carefully. The circular magnetic whatchamacallit was aligned perpendicular to the stream while the accelerator was aligned opposite of it. In a few seconds they were going to find out if it was possible to open a gate intentionally. If they could open one, they might be able to close one as well.
"Let's get out of here," Bill said, gesturing to the door of the shelter.
"I'm sure not going to stick around," Mark replied, closing the door to the connection and wiping his hands on a scrap of rag. The one thing he'd enjoyed about the recent jobs was getting his hands dirty. Both working for Savannah River and Columbia had involved far more time sitting in offices than building things. And he dearly loved to tinker with electrical contraptions.
They walked up the hill and through a stand of old trees where a farmhouse had apparently once stood, then across the road and down the slope on the far side. In the tobacco field on the far side the army had kindly constructed a bunker. It was a hole in the ground, covered with scrounged heavy timbers, I-beams and corrugated steel, which had been piled six layers deep with sandbags. Bill had been surprised and amused to find that the Army had an automatic sandbag filler. Construction of the bunker, using civilian backhoes, the sandbag filler and a small army of soldiers, had taken less than six hours. It was large enough for the team and all their gear. Another bunker a short distance away, connected by a reinforced and covered trench, held the military command post.
Bill picked up a field phone and cranked it.
"Bravo Company," a voice answered on the other end.
"All your people ready?" Bill asked.
"Hold one," the soldier answered. In a moment he was back. "All clear."
"Initiating," Bill said, nodding at Mark.
Mark nodded back and pressed a button on a hastily rigged control panel.
There should have been an explosion or a blast of light. Some sort of decent special effect. But there wasn't. The cameras in the inflatable shelter showed the whatchamacallit starting to spin. It got up to full speed and then, suddenly, as the lights in the bunker dimmed slightly, there was a round mirror hanging just off the ground.
"Kill it," Bill said. "Send in the evaluation team."
Bill walked out of the shelter and up the hill where the trees were and watched as a Humvee bounced down the hill. Five men in environmental suits, carrying a selection of heavy weapons, jumped out of the Humvee and entered the inflatable shelter. Bill waited impatiently and then one came out of the shelter and waved a hand.
Bill caught a ride with the battalion commander as he drove by on the way down the hill. When he got to the bottom he waved a hand at Command Master Chief Miller who was stripping out of his environment suit. Miller had lost quite a bit of what remaining hair he had left but otherwise was recovering nicely from his exposure to a blast of neutrons and fairly hard gammas.
"Desert environment," Miller said. "Some mountains nearby. What look like ruins at the base of the mountains. No animals seen or plants. And no Titcher for sure. Air monitors say it's got enough oxygen, slightly elevated carbon dioxide. Pressure is about earth normal. Cold as hell, though; temperature on the far side reads five degrees Fahrenheit."
"Did you say ruins?" Bill asked.
"We can't say that the entire world is desert," Bill noted over the secure link. "We can only see the tiny slice on the other side of the gate. The archeologist we conscripted from the University of Kentucky estimates that the ruins are at least ten thousand years old. We've found some biologicals at this point, but they're all lower order, our equivalent of insects and lichen."
"Did the Titcher wipe them out?" the President asked.
"No, there's no sign of Titcher biology," Bill said with a shrug. "Everything has a lifespan, Mr. President. Species rise and fall, at least if you look at the evolutionary record," he noted, carefully. "Civilizations rise and fall, too, as do planets. Eventually, our sun will go cold and the earth will pass into history. It won't happen for millions of years but it appears that it already has happened on that planet. I'd be surprised if the ruins don't turn out to be older than they appear. I suspect that the race that made them died out or left, to somewhere warmer at a guess. The boson that we connected to was a remnant from when they had lived on that planet, raised their children, built their civilization."
"It feels sad," the national security advisor said. "But it doesn't do much for us at present."
"It tells us we can open gates," Bill pointed out. "I don't think that the Titcher can come through a gate that is opened to a world that they don't control. On the other hand, quiescent bosons are a threat."
"So are gates," the secretary of defense said, dryly. "We don't know that the Titcher are the only threat. Look at the Mreee. Not to mention the Boca Raton anomaly. We need to figure out a way to close them and keep them closed."
"I'm not sure that's possible with any near future technology, Mr. Secretary," Bill said. "I've spoken to several other specialists and it's a general agreement that it would take orders of magnitude more power, precisely applied, to close a wormhole, permanently. The quiescent bosons that we've connected to indicate that it is possible, but the how remains a mystery. What we have been able to do, based on these experiments, is figure out how to channel the boson output from the Orlando generator. The bosons seem to choose their channels based upon maximum probability in the local environment. By applying an induction field, a very high order induction field, we've managed to get the bosons to avoid track three. So there are no more bosons generating on the track the Titcher use. But there are over a hundred quiescent bosons currently scattered around on that track, from Florida to France. It continues, apparently, to be closed, but it might open at any time."
"Any suggestions what we can do about that?" the President asked.
"Remember that great big Van de Graaff generator I was talking about?" Bill said. "We think that the bosons are moveable if they have a charge applied, same with the gates. But we need some huge Van de Graaff generators to apply that charge. After that I'd suggest moving them somewhere remote, Frenchman Flats comes to mind, and leaving them. Maybe even bury them in an old mine or something, with a nuke set to detonate. We won't be able to do that in weeks, maybe not in years, we may be talking about decades, but it's doable. Assuming that the reality matches with theory."
"And you can't turn off the Orlando generator?" the national security advisor asked.
"No, ma'am," Bill said. "Same problem. I've looked at some of Ray Chen's surviving notes; he had some on his home computer. And I've talked it over with Dr. Hawking and Dr. Gonzalvez. But it comes to the same conclusion. We'd need about one GAEE, that's pronounced gee, or a Global Annual Energy Expenditurethat is about 1x1018 Joules . . . a hell of a lot in other words, and something that could actually channel it, which doesn't exist even in theory, to pump enough power into one of those gates to close it. There are some very out there theoretical materials that might be used, but I think even then all we'd get is destabilization and the materials vaporizing in a microsecond or two. And the vaporization would be a high energy event, think explosion. We could drop a nuke on the other side of some of the gates that are on other tracks and try to destabilize those tracks. But we already know about the secondary effects. How many areas do you want to irradiate? There's a gate in the suburbs of Los Angeles, now, and another in Cleveland. Both of them open onto abandoned worlds. But drop a nuke in one on that track and we might end up with neutron pulses on all the others."
"Not good," the President said.
"No, Mr. President," the national security advisor replied. "Especially since some have opened in Europe as well. I can imagine the reaction of the French."
"Did you know that one of the planets has been tentatively identified?" the President said.
"No, I didn't," Bill answered, excitedly.
"I don't know the jargon," the President added. "But it's supposed to be relatively close."
"BT-315-9," the national security advisor said, consulting a note. "It's a star something like ours. . . ."
"G class?" Bill asked.
"Yes, that's what it says here. About sixty light-years away. It's on track one. The gate is in Missouri. One of the survey team knew something about stars and thought she recognized some of them. So a team of astronomers went through and took a look. They're pretty sure that it's that star. They took readings on some others and they all tracked back to that location. Now they're sending in excited reports, something about triangulation, and they want to somehow establish a major astronomy base on the other side."
"I can understand why they're excited," Bill said. "And I agree. But it has some impact on the other problem. I'd like to get some research done at the other open gates. It might turn out that they're all relatively local. By the same token, it might tell us how much power is required to open a gate that's not relatively local. And it tells us that we're at least in the same universe. He . . . heck, that's practically right next door. As far as we knew before that, we might have been opening into other universes, much less in the same galactic quadrant."
"And this is important, why?" the defense secretary asked.
"Well, I'd personally like to know where the Titcher are in 'real' space, Mr. Secretary," Bill pointed out. "Just in case they have space travel technology as well."
"Oh, how truly good," the secretary said.
"They might and they might not," Bill said, excitedly. "But it clears up the major point that the gates can open in this universe. And that, Mr. President, is a very, very good thing indeed."
"We're opening another one?" Chief Miller groused.
"Yep," Bill said. The current boson was located in Indiana, well out in a cornfield. A forty-acre section had been hastily mowed down and revetments constructed for units of the Indiana National Guard. A presidential order had been signed calling all units of the National Guard to federal service. There had been barely a squeak from Congress over the supplemental appropriation bill; at this point just about every state in the Union had one or more gates open in it and multiple identified bosons, many of them what the news media referred to as "Titcher bosons."
"Are you sure this is a good idea?" Miller asked as Bill and Mark checked the alignment of the linear accelerator. The accelerator had been modified so that it could be pivoted over a narrow arc, both horizontally and vertically.
"Yep," Bill answered. "You wanna go get suited up?"
"How do I get out of this chickenshit outfit?" Chief Miller muttered, but he went to get suited up.
"You gonna tell him?" Mark asked as soon as the SEAL was out of the building.
"Nope," Bill answered. "I might be wrong. I don't want him letting his guard down."
They were looking at the screens on the same hastily cobbled together control panel. Mark had taken a few hours that were otherwise unoccupied to run up a CAD diagram of a properly designed gate opening system. Columbia had dithered for a few days about whether to patent it or classify it and decided on the former. Now a construction firm in Taiwan was working on a new and improved version. Given that Columbia had the patent on the process, if the next experiment worked his option shares were going to go through the roof.
"Initiating," he said, flipping the switch. The Circular Inductance Generator, formerly known as the circular magnetic whatchamacallit, began to spin. The lights briefly dimmed. Nothing.
"No formation," Mark said.
"Track it around a little," Bill answered. "Our aim might have been off."
The device, still operative, was tracked back and forth.
"We're using a hell of a lot of juice," Mark pointed out.
"The government's paying," Bill replied.
Then a looking glass appeared in the air.
"Formation," Bill said over the radio as Mark started shutting down the systems. "Survey team in."
They watched external monitors as a Humvee bounced down the hill. Then a group of five heavily armed men in environment suits, their body posture making them appear as if they were being hard done by, walked into the shed and then into the looking glass.
It was sort of like doing a tactical entry. Sort of. You never knew what was on the other side of the door. Miller knew that he should be getting blasé about it, but instead each successive entry was getting more and more on his nerves. And something about Weaver's attitude, they'd been around each other enough at this point to tell when the Doc was planning something devious, had him worried.
So he took point. If it was going to be really bad, better that he be the one figuring out what to do about it than the newbie they'd just gotten in from Coronado.
He hefted the MG-240 that he had started carrying as a personal weapon and looked over his shoulder at the team, most of whom were similarly armed.
"Anybody head sweeps me and I'll kill you even if we survive," he growled, then stepped into the looking glass.
He automatically stepped forward to let the team out into the area around the gate then dropped to one knee. Sweep left, impressions, very earthlike, sweep right, green grass, blue sky, look outward, hill, guns, tanks!
He raised the MG-240, his finger going to the trigger, and then stopped.
"Everybody freeze," Miller snapped over the radio. Then he looked around and swore as he lowered the machine gun. "I'm gonna kill that motherfucker."
"Kansas!" Miller snapped over the cell phone. "I thought I was going to another fucking planet and you sent me to Kansas?"
"You'd have preferred another planet?" Bill asked.
"No, not really," Miller admitted. "'What did you do, today, Daddy?' 'Oh, went to another planet. This one had a gravity that was high enough I got squashed flat which is why I look like a pancake.' It's gonna happen sooner or later."
"Agreed," Bill said. "Which is why we're going to start shifting the bosons to internal gates. Instantaneous transportation! What man has been dreaming about for decades!"
"One or two persons at a time," the SEAL noted. "From gates in some really odd places. It's not going to take the place of planes any time soon."
"Yeah, but we're having more bosons produced all the time," Bill pointed out. "Spreading out all over the world. We've already got the ability to open one in, say, Virginia, and one in, say, France. And people can just walk in one and out the other. But movement can also be controlled. Set up customs, that sort of thing. And now there's a direct link between Kansas and Indiana. Don't know what use that will be, admittedly, but I could see a shipping company setting up a conveyor belt that shifts stuff across the gate. FedEx, maybe."
"Yeah, open one up in New York and another in California and they won't even have to look at 'flyover country' anymore," Miller said, grumpily.
"I even know which two gates," Bill replied. "They're next on the list. The only problem will be crowd control."
"Rental car agencies are going to love you." The SEAL grinned.
"So does my boss," Bill replied. "The contract with the DOD had a normal disclaimer about 'civilian use' of anything learned from my research. The accountants at Columbia are already having spasms. They're looking at it as a license to print money. A fee for opening the gates and a percentage of any profits."
"People from other countries opening up clandestine gates to the U.S.," Miller noted. "The new illegal Zimbabwean problem."
"You're such a grump." Bill laughed.
"Open up the Titcher gates, first," Miller said.
"Oh, definitely," Bill replied. "Just a question of from where to where. Once opened, we still don't know how to close them. And moving them will be . . . difficult."
Bill had called Sheila, finally, and told her that he was a little busy with some stuff he couldn't talk about and that he wasn't going to be in Huntsville any time soon. She'd taken the hint and dropped him an e-mail detailing all the reasons she was glad he was out of her life, including that his best friend in Huntsville was much better than he was in bed.
Columbia had a division that was supposed to handle civilian uses of any of their developments. They had taken over the gate opening system as soon as the first one was opened between a farmer's field in the Hudson Valley and a suburban backyard in East Orange County, California. They were, in Bill's opinion, handling it badly and the news services were paying more attention to that than the still quiescent Titcher gates. But Bill had figured out the theory; it was up to other people to mishandle the marketing and public relations.
He'd gotten sorely out of shape lately so he'd picked up a mountain bike in a sporting goods store in South Orlando and brought it up to the anomaly site. After reading the e-mail from Sheila he took the bike down off its rack, clipped his cell phone to his waist and went out biking.
Most of the remaining roads around the anomaly site had been closed but the majority of the TD area was still off-limits to unauthorized personnel. Which meant it was perfect, except for the terrain, for biking. He headed down a track towards the river to the west and rode along what had once been suburban streets. Nature had already started to prevail in the area. Grasses that had not been uprooted were starting to sprout green and along the river, which had been partially shielded, saplings were starting to grow. A few trees that had merely been pushed over were sprouting new growth upwards. Life goes on.
But not if the Titcher came back. The Titcher would turn this all into their green fungus, if not their vast strip mines. The records from the Mississippi gate had been studied and the conclusion was that it was a world the Titcher had destroyed and abandoned.
He stopped down by the stream and looked at the water, thinking. The water had run brown with silt for the first few weeks after the explosion but now, with the majority of runoff that would occur having happened and the plants coming back, it was clear as gin. Clearer, he suspected, than before the explosion. There were fish in it, as well, big guppy-looking things, some of them with bright blue tails.
They had been unable to close the remnant Titcher bosons. The destabilization seemed to spread along the "track." Which meant that besides the gates in Tennessee, Eustis, Staunton and Archer, presumably, they had to worry about thirty inactive bosons scattered from Northwest Florida to Saskatchewan. And he had no idea how soon the destabilization would go away. Just a pretty strong gut feeling, based on very limited theory, that it wouldn't be long.
He got back on the bike and pedaled up the shallow hill towards where UCF used to stand. And the anomaly was still pumping out bosons, although they had limited it to three tracks at least: one, two and four. They were all over the western hemisphere at this point, except Tierra Del Fuego, and had spread as far as the Philippines and Tibet. They were coming out a shade more slowly, now, having lost nearly four seconds in the past month. Which meant the rate wasn't going to change appreciably any time soon. In the meantime, since they weren't closing them as fast as they were being produced, the bosons were a menace that might produce more things like the Titcher, or the Boca Raton anomaly, at any time.
The answer to that was to link the gates as fast as possible, which was one of the reasons that he was getting ticked with Columbia's civilian applications side. The news media was getting huffy because they saw it as a money grab by Columbia, which was not only a big corporation but a, horrors, Defense Contractor. They hadn't even touched on the fact that as long as the gates were open, they were available to any species that had the capability to open them, friendly or hostile. And despite his initial pronouncement, all the species they had encountered seemed to be hostile.
That was bothering the SETI folks no end, but they were blaming it on the way that the government had handled first contact. They seemed to be ignoring the fact that First Contact from the Titcher was the snatching of two innocent retirees.
Columbia's civilian side, meanwhile, had gotten wrapped up by their lawyers. Gates gave instantaneous and unhazardous communication from Point A to Point B. But that wasn't enough for the lawyers. They were trotting out all of the potential horrors that might be involved, litigation-wise. If someone tripped on the exit from the gate, who would get sued? Columbia, that's who. If someone got hit by a truck, said truck delivering materials to a gate, who would get sued? That's right, Columbia. If a gate was opened to one Point B and another Point B was considered to be more economically viable, who would get blamed? You guessed it.
So the gates remained closed while the news media howled about monopolies, the Congress held fact-finding commissions, the lobbyists ran around asking for bills and unknown potential aliens rubbed their hands in glee at all the available bosons.
And, oh, yes, transportation remained via car, truck and airplane.
Humans could not be the only sentient race in range to detect them that would sooner or later notice the available bosons. Someone was going to open one up. And, like the Titcher gates, Bill anticipated that it would be sooner rather than later.
"Boson fourteen is linking to a remote active boson; direction galactic hubward."
Tchar looked at the viewscreen and frowned at the face of his littermate, Tsho'an.
"Dreen?"
"Probably not; this is a Class Nine boson, not a Class Six."
"It could be a remnant," Tchar said.
"It just started linking," Tsho'an argued. "That seems to suggest that the remote was recently formed. We are not alone. Well, alone with only the Dreen for company."
"Yes," Tchar replied, grunting in black humor. "We need Unitary approval to open a remote gate. Especially after the disaster with gate seven. I'll submit a request."
"Do you think we'll get it?" Tsho'an asked.
"I really don't know. I think that they would like to see all the bosons turned off. The transportation guilds have been complaining, again, about incursions on their authority. Move it as quickly as possible to Sector Nine, just in case it is a hostile entity. If it is, we'll have to set up quarantine measures. I'll send a message to the Unitary Council. We will see about opening it."
"They could be friendly," Tsho'an pointed out. "Any support against the Dreen would be useful."
"I was going to bring that up," Tchar noted, closing the connection.
"It had been quiescent for two weeks," the physicist from the French Academy of Sciences said. Bill knew him, slightly, from scientific conferences they both had attended prior to the opening of the Chen Anomaly. He and Bill disagreed on just about every major scientific topic that existed, especially if it had a political flavor. They cordially detested one another, in fact. But they were buddies compared to most of the aliens humans had encountered. "Then a gate formed. The farmer who owns the vineyard contacted authorities immediately, of course. Then they came through. Before our reaction team could arrive, I might add."
They were five beings in armor that was marked with a muted, vaguely sand-colored camouflage. The beings were bipedal, nearly three meters tall, with three fingers and a thumb. Other than that it was impossible to determine what they looked like in their all-covering suits. They might not be that tall, if the suits were made like Wyverns.
One of the beings was talking in pantomime with a human wearing an environment suit. The aliens' weapons, presumably weapons, that they had been carrying on entry were stacked up by the gate. They were large guns that looked similar to rifles but instead of a conventional barrel they had large bores that looked vaguely like a blunderbuss. Bill suspected that they fired something other than nails. The ground was torn with tracks from armored vehicles and the French Leclerc Mk2 tanks that surrounded the gate had effectively destroyed the vineyard.
Bill walked towards the group as the academic sputtered behind him. He touched the person in the environment suit on the arm and smiled as the woman turned towards him and widened her eyes in surprise that he was not similarly dressed.
"You washed them down, right?" Bill asked. "So far we haven't found anything on any of the worlds which is infectious." He reached into his backpack and pulled out a picture, holding it up so that it could be seen by the nearest of the aliens.
The alien let out a hissing howl that sounded remarkably like one of the dog-demons and could best be written as "Dreeen." The picture had been of a dead dog alien.
"Yeah," Bill said, nodding. "We call them Titcher." Then he extracted his laptop and opened it up. He was no wiz at three-D modeling but there were various cartoon programs available in two-D that worked. He brought up a program and ran a short video he'd composed on the way over.
First there was video of the Titcher, taken at the attack in Eustis by a TV cameraman who would probably win some sort of posthumous award. Then there was video of Nyarowlll shaking hands with Bill, clearly in a friendly manner. Then there was some video of the nuclear attacks in Eustis and Tennessee and more video from the aftermath, centering on all the dead Titcher. Then there was a cartoon, poorly done, of Nyarowlll smiling at Bill and then, when he turned his back, sticking a knife in it. Then there was another cartoon of Nyarowlll with her arm around a Titcher dog-demon.
The alien he had been talking to waved at the other four and they crowded around while Bill showed the video again. They nodded at each other, waving their necks back and forth, but didn't seem to be talking although there was some sound coming out of the suits. It took Bill a minute to realize that they were probably speaking via radio or some equivalent.
The first alien, he seemed to be a boss, waved at the screen on the third run-through and Bill froze it on a picture of Nyarowlll.
"Dreeen," the alien said.
"Mreee," Bill replied. "That one's Nyarowlll."
The alien cocked his head to the side. "Nyarowlll, Mreee."
Bill touched his chest. "Bill." Then he pointed at the screen. "Nyarowlll." He pointed at himself and the other humans around. "Human."
"Oooman," the alien replied. "Adar," he added, pointing at his chest.
"Humans," Bill said, then pointed at Nyarowlll. "Mreee. Bill. Nyarowlll."
Bill backed up to the point that had Nyarowlll being friendly then to the rough cartoon of her putting a knife in his back then to the picture of her being friendly with a Titcher. Then he brought up another, a video of the suited aliens, the Adar, side by side with the Titcher, one armored arm over the back of a thorn-thrower.
There was a hiss at that from the boss alien and he waved it away, spitting, clicking and gabbling in apparent anger.
Bill showed the scenes with Nyarowlll again and then waved at the pictures. Then he held up a hand and shrugged. It was anything but a universal gesture, but the alien, the Adar, seemed to get the point. Humans had been bitten once, that was going to make them shy.
The aliens waved their arms at each other for a bit, then the boss reached out carefully and touched one of the controls on the laptop, starting the footage. He ran it forward to the nuclear blasts and stopped at the mushroom clouds.
"Dreeen."
"Human," Bill said. "We did that."
"Adoool," the alien said. "Adoool." He pointed around at the tanks. "Adoool."
"Soldiers?" the French woman in the environment suit said. "War?"
"Actually," Bill replied. "I think it's more like 'smart' or 'good damned job.'"
The alien reached up and manipulated some latches on his neck at which one of the others waved a hand. He waved back and then took off his helmet, snuffling at the air.
He wasn't pretty. There were three eyes, one on either side of its head and one placed more or less where a human forehead would be. Just below it was an opening and below that was a wide beak, flat and round. Its skin was a pale bluish color.
"Tchar," the alien said through the snout; his mouth remained closed. "Tchar," he added, tapping his chest. Then he pointed at Bill. "Bill. Tchar."
"Hello, Tchar," Bill said. "Pleased to meet you. I hope."