The Chronoliths

“So we owe her the benefit of the doubt?”

“No,” Ray said. “We owe her more than that. We owe her our loyalty.”

Fond as ever of having the last word, he chose that moment to turn and head back for camp.

I stayed behind, standing mute between the moon and the floodlights. From this distance the tau core seemed a small thing. A very small thing with which to lever such a long result.

When I did sleep I slept soundly and long. I woke at noon under the translucent roof of the inflated quonset, alone but for a few off-shift security staff and exhausted night crew.

No one had thought to wake me. Everyone had been too busy.

I stepped out of the shade of the quonset into blistering sunlight. The sky was viciously bright, a thin blue veneer between the prairie and the sun. But it was the noise that struck me more immediately. If you’ve ever been near a sports stadium on the day of a game you know that sound, the rumble of massed human voices.

I found Hitch Paley by the food tent.

“More press than we bargained for, Scotty,” he said. “There’s a whole mob of them blocking the road. We got Highway Patrol trying to clear them off the tarmac. You know we’ve already been denounced in Congress? People covering their asses in case we don’t bring this off.”

“You think we have a chance?”

“Maybe. If they give us time.”

But no one wanted to give us time. The Kuinist militias were arriving by the truckload, and by the following morning the shooting had begun in earnest.

Twenty-four

I know what the future smells like.

The future, that is, imposed on the past; past and future mingled like two i

The night had been relatively quiet. Today, the day of the arrival, I woke from a round of exhausted sleep to the sound of sporadic gunfire — not close enough to inspire immediate panic; close enough that I dressed in a hurry.

Hitch was back at the food tent, complacently eating cold baked beans from a paper bowl. “Sit down,” he said. “It’s under control.”

“Doesn’t sound like it.”

He stretched and yawned. “What you hear is a bunch of Kuinists south along the road having words with security. Some of them are armed but all they want to do is shoot into the air and shake their fists. Basically, they’re spectators. What we also have is an equal number of journalists trying to get closer than the perimeter fences. The Uniforces are sorting them out. Sue wants them close to the arrival but not, you know, too close.”

“So how close is too close?”

“That’s an interesting question, isn’t it? The wonks and the engineers are all clustered down by the bunker. The press people are setting up a little farther east.”

The bunker, so-called, was a trench emplacement with a wooden roof, located a mile from the core, where Sue had set up gear to monitor and initiate the tau event. The trench was equipped with heaters to provide at least a little protection against the cold shock, and in a worst-case scenario the bunker was defensible against small-arms fire.

The core itself remained almost preposterously vulnerable, but the Uniforces people had pledged to protect it as long as they could keep our perimeters intact. The good news was that this ragtag crew of Kuinists down the road did not (Hitch said) constitute anything like a superior force.

“We may just pull this off, Scotty,” he said. “Given a little luck.”

“How’s Sue?”

“I haven’t seen her since sunrise, but — how is she? Wound up, is how she is. It wouldn’t surprise me if she blew an artery.” He looked at me oddly. “Tell me something. How well do you know her?”

“I’ve known her since I was a student.”

“Yeah, but how well? I’ve worked for her a long time, too, but I can’t honestly say I know her. She talks about her work — and that’s all she talks about, at least to me. Is she ever lonely, afraid, angry?”

This was an incongruous conversation to be having, it seemed to me, with the sound of rifle fire still popping down the road. “What’s your point?”

“We don’t know anything about her, but here we are, doing what she tells us. Which strikes me as peculiar, when I think about it.”

It struck me as peculiar, too, at least at that moment. What was I doing here? Nothing but risking my life, certainly nothing useful. But that wasn’t what Sue would say. You’re waiting for your time, she would say. Waiting for the turbulence.

I thought of what Hitch had told me in Mi

“It’s cooler this morning,” Hitch said. “Even in the sun. You notice that?”

It was some days before this that Adam Mills had arrived at his mother’s door along with five thuggish friends and an assortment of concealed weapons.

I won’t dwell on this.

Adam, of course, was psychotic. Clinically psychotic, I mean. All the markers were there. He was antisocial, a bully and, in a certain perverse way, a natural leader. His mental universe was a cluttered attic of secondhand ideology and blatant fantasy, all centered on Kuin or whatever it was he imagined Kuin to be. He had never formed the natural human attachment to family or friends. He was by all evidence absent a conscience.

Ashlee, in her darker moods, would blame herself for what Adam had become; but Adam was a product of his brain chemistry, not his upbringing. A genome profile and some simple blood tests would have flagged his problem at an early age. He might even have been treatable, to some limited extent. But Ash had never had the money for that kind of up-market medical intervention.

I ca

She is not to be blamed for this.

The result was that Adam had reliable information about the Kuin stone and our efforts to destroy it a good forty-eight hours before the news reached the press.

Adam promptly headed west, but he left two of his followers behind to prevent Ashlee from making any inconvenient calls. He could have simply killed her, but he elected instead to keep her in reserve, possibly as a hostage.

Bad as this was, it was not the worst of it.

The worst of it was that Kaitlin came to the apartment not long after Adam left, still ignorant of what had happened to Janice and expecting to join Ashlee for a leisurely lunch and maybe a movie in the evening.

The statistical measurement of low-level ambient radiation had been refined since Jerusalem and Portillo. Sue’s people were able to establish a much more accurate countdown for this arrival. But we didn’t need a countdown to feel it in the air.

Here’s how it stood when I climbed out of the bunker for a last breath of fresh air, some twenty minutes before the core was due to be activated.

There had been more gunfire south along the highway and sporadically at various points along the perimeter fence. So far, local and state police had managed to contain the Kuinists — there was a lot of anti-Kuinist sentiment in Wyoming since the storming of the State House, not least among civil servants and police. One Uniforces soldier had been injured by an Omega militiaman attempting to run the fence in an ATV, and four armed Kuinists of unknown affiliation had been shot to death in an effort to storm the northern checkpoint earlier this afternoon. Since then there had been only gestures and scattered arrests… although the crowd was still growing.