Blonde Bombshell (8 page)

That’s not right, George thought. He started to run. The stick was gaining both height and speed. Bu the time he got there, Rags was two metres off the ground, his hind legs paddling furiously.

George (no athlete) threw himself into the air and just managed to get his thumb and forefinger round Rags’ right hindpaw. He felt himself rising, looked down and saw the ground below getting perceptively further away. He was flying.

Immediately he let go, and landed hard on his left knee. Something gave way, and he yelled at the pain, which was suddenly more than he could possibly be expected to cope with. Before it overwhelmed him, he caught a fleeting glimpse of his dog, ten metres or so up in the air, hanging from a rapidly accelerating stick, which seemed to stretch impossibly — from thirty centimetres to a metre, just for a fraction of a second — before disappearing in a brief, vast flash of light and a crack like God’s leg breaking. And then nothing, except a blue sky, an absence of dog, and the agony of a dislocated knee.

He never saw Rags again. Many years later, as a junior science specialist in the Russian Air Force, he managed to get access to a restricted file concerning an incident that took place at those coordinates, on that day. Routine telemetry from an orbital observation platform had recorded an unexplained incursion. The readings were hopelessly garbled; they appeared to show a metallic object 20.72 centimetres long, powered by some kind of unbelievably advanced energy-exchange technology, entering Earth’s atmosphere somewhere over the Bering Strait; by means unknown and inexplicable it contrived to reach the surface without burning up, dropped harmlessly out of the sky, stayed there for about ten minutes (during which time its molecular signature changed, from titanium alloy to an organic cellulose compound not entirely unlike wood), then took off again, having somehow acquired an accompanying life-sign that didn’t correlate with any known terrestrial species; in 12.86 seconds it accelerated from approximately fifty metres per second to a velocity in excess of the speed of light, and was travelling faster than the orbital platform could track by the time it punched a tiny hole in the ozone layer and broke orbit. The report’s conclusion: this orbital platform is seriously buggered and should be decommissioned immediately, before it starts a war or something.

Great, thought the young Lieutenant Stetchkin. Aliens stole my dog.

But he couldn’t accept that. It was so fundamentally, grotesquely, indecently not fair that he refused to countenance the possibility. And so, for the next ten years, he devoted all his time, energy and prodigious intellectual gifts to proving, conclusively and beyond a shadow of a doubt, that there were no such things as aliens; that mankind was a unique anomaly; that no other world anywhere in the universe could possibly support any kind of life whatsoever, and especially not the sort of life that’d be capable of shooting a spaceship disguised as a bit of old stick into a suburban park and stealing an innocent child’s pet dog. Finally, he published his finest work, the Oslo paper the strange man had referred to. He came within a hair’s breadth of a Nobel prize, was offered enough chairs to fit out a football stadium and promptly quit academia and took a job in a bank. Naturally, everybody asked why. He never told them. To do so would be to admit that he’d managed to convince everybody on Earth except the one person who mattered. Himself.

“Bastards stole my dog,” he muttered through a mouthful of cheesecake.

Quite. And now they’d shot him and put him in a box, and it seemed more than likely that they were the ones looting all the money, too. Well, he wasn’t in the least surprised. People who’d steal a kid’s dog were clearly capable of anything.

Which left him with a problem. He knew the truth. Aliens were beaming the aposiderium out of the banknotes and reintegrating the leftovers. Convincing the world’s bankers was another matter. In its own right the concept was a bit on the rich side. Coming from the man who’d conclusively proved that there are no little green men from outer space, it was going to be harder to swallow than a nail-studded olive. The irony, he thought. In the nastiest, most spiteful way possible, it was more or less perfect.

Just a minute, he thought.

The waiter had left a receipt. He picked it up.

(1)  coffee $3.99

(1)  cheesecake $6.99

Debited to the account of the Global Society for the Ethical Treatment of Dumb Brutes

He read the words over a few times. They were everyday, familiar words, put together in accordance with the usual conventions of commercial grammar and syntax, and he didn’t understand them. A be-kind-to-animals group he’d never even heard of had just treated him to a drink and snack (nearly seven dollars for cheesecake? What a rip-off), but how could they? They couldn’t have known he’d even be there. The only people who’d have known that were—

He tried his phone, but it wasn’t working. He summoned the waiter and called for a laptop, then did a KeyHole search. No such body as the Global Society for the Ethical Treatment of Dumb Brutes. He overrode a few security lock-outs and did a UniBank search. That was slightly more helpful. The GSETDB had an account with the Credit Mayonnais. It had been opened at 09:01:21 that morning, and $10.98 had been paid into it, in cash, at the bank’s central branch in New York. He called up the CCTV footage, and saw the two men he’d just spent time with. He called up the references they’d given for opening the account. They turned out to be entirely non-existent, though the bank’s database had accepted them quite happily at the time.

$10.98. Exactly enough to cover one coffee and one cheesecake. He went back to the main screen, just in time to see the words Account closed appear. Well, he thought. Attention to detail, or what?

So that was the sort of “people” he was up against. Ruthless, powerful, manipulative, seriously resourceful, extremely thorough and almost touchingly considerate space aliens with advanced teleport technology and a craving for aposiderium. He put a call through to his boss at the bank.

“I know who’s doing it,” he said.

He could visualise his boss’s eyes widening like ripples in a pool. “Who?”

“And how they’re doing it,” George went on, “which is rather more important.”

“OK,” his boss said. “How?”

“So what we need,” George said, “and I know it won’t be easy, but if that’s what it takes then that’s what it takes—”

“George—”

“Electromagnetic shielding,” George said. “Preferably in the form of a coherent stasis field, though I guess we could get away with an oscillating pulse if we absolutely have to, provided we can keep the frequency up above—”

“George.”

“They’re using teleportation,” he explained. “I know, it’s not possible here on Earth, but where they come from, apparently, it’s no big deal. It was some kind of teleport device they used when they abducted me.”

“Abducted…”

“That’s right. After they shot me in the bar.”

“George.”

“What, sorry. Yes?”

“You’re fired.”

Short pause, comprised of silence as dense as the heart of a neutron star. “What?”

“You’re fired,” said George’s boss. “Sorry, but we did warn you. We told you, lay off the booze or we’re going to have to let you go. You’re a very clever guy, George, but at a time like this we just can’t afford to have a babbling drunk running our security operation. There’ll be an extra something in your severance package, but that’s it. The end of the line. Sorry.”

“Yes, but I’m not—” The phone went dead. George swore at it, then typed in his access code to open a line. His codes didn’t work. That quick.

Dimly, through the red mist of rage and frustration, he could just about see the man’s point. Electromagnetic shielding, for crying out loud. It was a technical possibility, but so was three million red-headed women joining hands to form a human chain across Denmark. From his boss’s perspective, which was more likely: that the money was being stolen by teleport-capable aliens, or that George Stetchkin had finally disappeared down inside the bottle and pulled the cork in after him?

He whimpered, and the sound attracted the waiter.

“Can I get a drink around here?” George asked.

“Certainly, sir,” the waiter replied, and brought him a glass of water.

11

?????

The director of the Institute for Interstellar Exploration had turned round three times and was just about to go to sleep when the Box buzzed him.

“Sorry to call so late, sir,” said a worried-looking face on the screen. “But we thought you should know. We’ve just had the first telemetry from the Mark Two.”

The director lifted his head and peered at the screen over the edge of his basket. “Well?”

“There’s something odd, sir. Maybe you should—”

“Don’t do anything,” the director barked. “I’ll be there in ten minutes.”

He jumped up, paused in front of the mirror to straighten his collar, and hurried into his study. “Screen,” he snapped, and a metre-square section of thin air glowed blue. “Show probe sensor data.”

A voice from nowhere said, Restricted access. Please state your user code and password.

“Seven-four-four-five-five-three-three-A,” the director recited; then, “Spot.”

The thin-air screen blazed like fire and turned white and two-dimensional. Numbers formed, like bugs splattered on the windscreen of a faster-than-light lorry. The director looked at them and scowled.

He wasn’t supposed to have private access, of course, but since he’d designed the system himself, including all the security protocols and lock-outs, it hardly mattered. What did matter was that he should know what he was walking into when he arrived at the office.

They couldn’t have found out, he told himself. Could they?

Odd, young F’siernrtf had said;
odd.
A curious word to choose. He thought about it some more as he programmed the co-ordinates into his home teleport station (wasn’t supposed to have one of those, either). No, he decided, they couldn’t have. Otherwise, he’d have been woken up by the muzzles of Internal Affairs blaster rifles, not the weebling voice of his junior assistant. He shoved his CoinStar and a few data chips into his briefcase, took a last look at the data on the screen and said, “Off.” The screen vanished. “Delete communications log entry,” he added, and a non-directional bleep confirmed that his order had been obeyed.

Could they?

One last chore. He went into the kitchen and filled Spot’s bowl with dried apricots and ManChow chunks. The human was still asleep, snoring gently, his squeaky rubber phone gripped tight between his hands. The director smiled in spite of himself, then went back into the living room and activated the teleport beacon. A single clear note told him it was ready.

He hesitated. Internal Affairs, he thought; now there’s a nasty bunch of alphas for you. Just suppose they had found out. What could be more convenient than an unfortunate teleport malfunction, resulting in the guilty party’s molecules being scattered across three continents? No fuss, no scandal. It was what he’d do, if he was IA.

He shook himself. Mild paranoia, he decided, brought on by —what? Guilt? Fear of being found out, more likely. Besides, IA were brutal, unimaginative and scarily straightforward in their approach, but they weren’t the sharpest teeth in the jaw. The only way anybody would catch him would be if he gave himself away; by acting out of character, for example. He stepped on to the teleport pad and growled, “Activate.”

A split second to travel halfway across the planet in kit form, a slightly larger split from the same second to pull himself together, or at least to reassure himself that the machine hadn’t decided that his head would look so much better growing out of the small of his back, the inevitable lurch of nausea as the contents of his stomach caught up with the rest of him, and he opened his eyes and looked round the operations room. It hadn’t been so crowded since launch day. Obviously, he hadn’t been the only one to get an early-morning call.

His
room, though, because it was his operation. “‘Well?” he snapped. No need to direct the enquiry at anyone in particular. His staff were well trained. It was somebody’s job to answer him, and that somebody would be standing by the pad, ready and waiting.

“On screen now, sir,” said a voice at his side. He didn’t recognise it, and didn’t bother to look round. “Preliminary scans show no sign of—”

“Yes, thank you, I’m not blind.” The screen teemed with numbers, like flies on a —

”Perhaps I could draw your attention to—”

— hot day.
“I
know, yes. No sign of the Mark One, some indications of recent ecological damage, and two Ostar life-signs.” He scowled. It lacked spontaneity, of course. “I want to know who they are and what they’re doing there, and I want to know
now.
Understood?”

The Mark Two, of course, wouldn’t be able to see the two twinkling green dots that indicated the presence of the unexpected tourists. An Ostar fusion bomb could, by law, only be used against other, lesser species. If the target had Ostar on it, the biosignature sensor would detect them across two parsecs and the bomb would be paralysed until they’d been rounded up and removed to a safe distance. A piece of masking tape over the sensor head would put it out of action, of course, but that would be illegal, and so nobody would dream of doing such a thing. But they might, in a moment of unforgivable carelessness, forget to wire the sensor into the bomb’s own brain; in which case, planetside could see the little green twinkles, and the bomb couldn’t.

“It’s just sitting there,” he said. “Why hasn’t it blown up the damn planet?”

Someone replied, “It’s gathering data, sir. Assessing the planet’s defence system.”

The director made a show of studying the figures. “There isn’t one.”

“Not that we can see, sir. It takes the view that if it can’t see a defence grid, it must be a very good defence grid, and that’s why it’s decided to investigate further. After all, the Mark One—”

“Yes, fine.” The director tried not to let his frustration show. Deep down, though, he bitterly regretted letting the technical people talk him into fitting the Mark Two with a level-9 artificial intelligence. After all, it was a bomb, military hardware; really, just a flying soldier with fins and an engine, its sole purpose to follow orders without question. It would’ve been far more appropriate to fit it with a level— 10 artificial stupidity. “Well? Can you see any sign of a defence grid?”

“Sir?”

He sighed. “It’s a perfectly simple question. We’re seeing what it’s seeing, or what it saw a few hours ago, at any rate. I take the view that a bunch of highly qualified canines like you people are rather better placed to interpret data than a bomb with a camera up its nose.”

Pause. Then, “Not as such, sir. However, there are some anomalous readings that might indicate advanced technology. Here, sir, and here.”

A red pointer highlighted some huddles of numbers on the big screen. The director looked at them. He’d noticed them, of course, when he’d taken his private sneak preview, but he hadn’t stopped to analyse them properly. “Could be anything,” he said. “Seen from orbit, I bet my egg timer gives off readings like that.”

“Your egg timer is advanced Ostar technology, sir,” someone pointed out reproachfully. “It uses the same basic circuitry as an ion disrupter. We would incline towards the view that the Mark Two’s caution is not unjustified.” Whoever it was paused for breath, checked to see his throat was still there (a necessary precaution for a subordinate who’d just contradicted an alpha male) and added, “We should also consider the implications of the lifesign readings. Possible advanced technology and two Ostar on the planet”

And all for the want of a tiny square of masking tape. If it had just been the tech indications, he could probably have bullied them into overriding the bomb’s tiny but conscientious brain and detonating; just as he’d bullied them into not connecting up the biosignature sensor in the first place. But the tech indications
and
the life-signs; if he tried to assert his authority he might prevail, or he might not. The essence of being a successful pack leader is not fighting battles you may not win.

But it was so horribly frustrating. All the pent-up fury in his heart and brain wanted him to shout,
I know they haven’t got a defence grid, I’ve been there, just set off the goddamn bomb!
He couldn’t, of course. Also, there was the small matter of what had happened to the Mark One. If something
had
happened to it — not a defence grid because there wasn’t one, but something else; some weird anomaly in the planet’s atmosphere, some freak factor he hadn’t predicted and couldn’t explain — then it was possible the Mark Two would fail as well, in which case he’d face the distinctly unpleasant prospect of persuading the Governing Council to fund a third bomb, with no convincing explanation of what had become of the other two.

“Fine,” he growled, and it was mildly reassuring to watch his subordinates instinctively arch their backs and flatten their ears. “Get me some answers on those two life-signs, and then maybe we’ll have some sort of a clue what’s going on down there.”

Ostar literature had a wealth of classic manuals dealing with industrial relations, canine resource management and intrahierarchical interaction in the workplace. Nearly all of them were called
The Art of War
or something similar, and most of them headed a key chapter by quoting Gr’uuiu’s timeless maxim,
Let them hate, so long as they fear.
They all agreed that the best way to stop subordinates from thinking for themselves about inappropriate matters was to keep them stressed out and frantically running round in circles. It had worked for General Yk at the siege of H@no’otuk, and the director could see no reason why it shouldn’t work for him as well. Accordingly he snarled a series of orders, most of them impossible to obey or with entirely impractical timescales, scowled at a few key workers, and left them to get on with it.

Bloody planet, he thought; more lives than a cat. The likeliest explanation was that the Mark One had simply got lost or hit a comet or broken down somewhere; after all, it had been built at the D’swewr shipyards, and the superintendent there was the nephew of the chairdog of the Governing Council; before his sideways promotion, he’d been head of the Arts Commission, a job he’d forfeited after absent-mindedly chewing the corner of S’lk’s
Still Life With Biscuits.
But he couldn’t be sure. What was certain was that a third request for funding would not be well received. It would mean having to let certain Council members know that he knew where the bones were buried, which in turn would make him an inconvenience. Things happened to inconveniences.

The teleport took him home in a whirlwind of light and energy. Too late to go back to bed, so he sat at his desk and tried to soothe himself with tedious routine administration. Usually it worked very well, but not this time. Bloody planet. Horrible, bad primates. Grr.

He heard a soft whimpering noise, coming from the kitchen. He glanced at the clock: time for Spot’s breakfast. He went through and opened a tin of hamburgers, as a special treat.