The Chronoliths

Our first day at the dig had been enormously busy but surprisingly productive. Sue’s technical people had triangulated the center of the arrival site, where the military engineers graded a level space and poured a concrete slab to serve as a foundation for the tau-variable device, called “the core” for short. It wasn’t, of course, a nuclear core in the conventional sense, but the fragment of exotic matter it was designed to produce required similar shielding, both thermal and magnetic.

Smaller foundations were poured for the several redundant diesel generators that would power it and for the smaller generators that ran our string of lights and our electronics. By the second sunset we had turned our isolated highland into an industrial barrens of almost Victorian bleakness and had frightened away an astonishing number of jackrabbits, prairie dogs, and snakes. Our lamps glowed in the darkness like the ancient sentinel fires of the Crow or the Blackfoot, the Sioux or the Cheye

Sue had assigned me lookout duty, but that was so obviously a piece of make-work that I had traded it for the less glamorous but infinitely more useful work of digging pit latrines and hauling lime. Just before sunset, numb with exhaustion, I carried my pocket terminal to the rising ground below the bluff and established the link with Ashlee. There was bandwidth enough for voice, not images, but that was all right. It was her voice I needed to hear.

Everything was fine, she said. The money Hitch had advanced us was paying some bills we had long needed to pay, and she had even taken Kaitlin out to a couple of movies. She didn’t understand, she said, why it had been necessary to leave Morris Torrance there to keep an eye on her — he was sitting in his car on the street outside the apartment. He wasn’t a nuisance, she said, but he made her feel like she was under surveillance.

Which she was. Sue had been worried that Kuinist elements might have traced her to Mi

“He’s a nice enough guy,” Ash said, “but it’s a little u

“Just until I get back,” I told her.

“Too long.”

“Think of it as a way to preserve my peace of mind.”

“Think of it as a reason to come back soon.”

“Soon as I can, Ash.”

“So what’s it like… Wyoming?”

I lost a syllable or two of that to dropout but took the gist. “Wish you could see it. The sun’s just gone down. The air smells like sagebrush.” The air smelled like creosote and lime and hot metal, but I preferred the lie. “The sky’s almost as pretty as you are.”

“…Bullshit.”

“I spent the day digging a latrine.”

“That’s more like it.”

“I miss you, Ash.”

“You, too.” She paused, and there was a sound that might have been the security bell back home; then she said, “I think there’s somebody at the door.”

“I’ll call tomorrow.”

“…Tomorrow,” she echoed, and then the line shut down completely.

But I couldn’t reach her the next day. We couldn’t get a line through anywhere east of the Dakotas, despite all the multiple redundancies still embedded in the networks. A bunch of nodal servers must have gone down, Ray Mosely told me, possibly due to yet another act of Kuinist sabotage.

It was because of the communications problem that the DOD media guru decided to alert the press a day earlier than we had pla

That next night the engineers erected a circle of achingly bright sulfur-dot lamps. We worked while the air was cool and the moon was up, carving a blockhouse out of the dry earth a mile from the touchdown site, burying cables and unrolling enormous lengths of link fence. The fencing would keep out both sightseers and Kuinists, should any of them get wind of the effort. Hitch opined that it would keep out antelopes but not any number of larger mammals, not without an armed guard. But we had that, too.

I crawled into my cot at sunrise bleeding from both my hands.

The siege was about to begin.

Twenty-three

Until now we’d had the site to ourselves. Shortly, the world would be with us.

And everything that implied. Not just press people, but Kuinists of all stripes… though we hoped the isolated location and short notice would preclude a massive haj. (“This is our haj,” Sue had said more than once. “This one belongs to us.”)

So our Uniforces troops arrayed themselves around our fenced perimeter and up along the bluff, and we notified the Highway Patrol and state officials, who were deeply unhappy with us for making our work public but lacked the authority to shut us down. Ray Mosely figured we had at most twelve hours before the first outsiders began to arrive. We had already managed to erect a cranelike superstructure above the poured foundation that would support the tau core, and to rig and test all our ancillary equipment. But we weren’t finished.

Sue hovered around the large flatbed truck which contained the core itself, second-guessing the engineers, until Ray and I distracted her with lunch. We choked down mil-surplus meals under a canvas tent while Ray walked us through a checklist. The work was ahead of schedule, which served to calm some of Sue’s fears.

At least briefly. Sue was what the doctors call “agitated.” In fact she gave every indication that she was on the brink of nervous collapse. She moved restlessly and aimlessly, drummed her fingers, blinked, confessed she hadn’t been able to sleep. Even when she was engaged in conversation, her eyes tended to stray toward the concrete core emplacement and the glittering steel tubing of the support structure.

She continued to talk relentlessly about the project. Her immediate fear was that the press might be delayed or the Chronolith arrive prematurely. “It’s not so much what we do here,” she said, “as what we’re seen to do here. We don’t succeed unless the world sees us succeed.”

(And I considered what a slender reed that really was. We had only Sue’s assurance that destroying a Chronolith at the moment of its arrival might tip the balance of this shadow war — might destabilize the feedback loop on which Kuin allegedly depended. But how much of that was calculation, how much wishful thinking? By virtue of her position and her fervent advocacy Sue had been able to carry us all along with her, invested as she was with the authority of her mathematics and her profound understanding of tau turbulence. But that didn’t mean she was necessarily right. Or even, necessarily, sane.)

After lunch we watched as a crew of stevedores and a crane operator lifted the tau core from its crate and hauled it as delicately as if it were compressed dynamite to its resting place. The core was a sphere three meters in diameter, anodized black and studded with electronic ports and cable bays. I gathered from what Sue had told me that it was essentially a magnetic bottle in which some exotic form of cold plasma was already contained. When the core was activated, an array of internal high-energy devices would initiate fermionic decohesion and a few nearly massless particles of tau-indeterminate matter would be created.

This material, Sue claimed, would be sufficient to destabilize the arriving Chronolith attempting to occupy its space. What that meant was still unclear, at least to me. Sue said the interaction of the competing tau spaces would be violent but not “unduly energetic,” i.e., it would probably not wipe out all of Modesty County and us along with it. Probably.