The Chronoliths

Sue had allowed a body of journalists to set up recording equipment well behind the bunker, and I was able to see them from where I stood, a line of trucks and tripods about a football field’s length to the east. There were dozens of these people, most diverted here from Cheye

Many of our machine operators and manual laborers had already left the site. The remaining civilian engineers and scientific crew were either crowded into the bunker now or watching from behind the line of journalists.

The tau core was suspended in its steel frame over the concrete pad like a fat black egg. A plume of dust in the near distance was Hitch Paley, bringing the last van of our original convoy up the graded access road from the highway to park it near the bunker. All these vehicles had been cold-proofed against the arrival.

Also obvious was the tau chill, the premonitory coolness of the air — and not just of the air but of everything, earth and flesh, blood and bone. We had lost only a fraction of a centigrade degree at this stage. The cold shock was just begi

I took out my phone and made yet another attempt to reach Ashlee. The call failed to go through, just as all my calls had failed to go through for most of a week now. Sometimes there was a general failure message from the system, sometimes (as now) only a blank screen and a whisper of distorted audio. I put the phone away.

I was surprised when Sue Chopra opened the steel bunker door and stepped out behind me. Her face was wan and she was visibly trembling. She shaded her eyes against the sun.

I said, “Shouldn’t you be down below?”

“It’s all clockwork now,” she said. “It runs itself.”

She stumbled over a mesquite root and I took her arm. Her arm was cold.

“Scotty,” she said, as if recognizing me for the first time.

“Take a deep breath,” I said. “Are you all right?”

“Just tired. And I didn’t eat.” She shook her head quizzically. “The question that keeps coming to mind… did something bring me here? Or did I bring myself? That’s the strange thing about tau turbulence. It gives us a destiny. But it’s a destiny without a god. Destiny with no one in charge.”

“Unless it’s Kuin.”

She frowned. “Oh, no, Scotty. Don’t say that.”

“Not long now. How’s it look downstairs?”

“Like I said. Clockwork. Good, solid numbers. You’re right, I need to go back… but will you come with me?”

“Why?”

“Because there’s actually a fairly high level of ionizing radiation out here. You’re getting a chest X-ray every twenty minutes.” And then she smiled. “But mainly because I find your presence reassuring.”

It was a good enough reason, and I would have gone with her, but that was when we felt the crump of a distant explosion. The sound of gunfire erupted again, much closer than it should have been.

Sue instinctively dropped to her knees. Idiotically, I remained standing. The firing began as a pop-pop staccato but immediately increased to a nearly continuous volley. The fence (and a big gate) was yards behind us. I looked that way and saw Uniforces perso

Sue had fixed her eyes on the bluff. I followed her gaze.

Wispy smoke issued from the Uniforces observation point there.

“The journalists,” she whispered.

But of course they weren’t journalists. They were Kuinists — a group of militiamen bright enough to have highjacked a network truck outside of Modesty Creek and savvy enough to have passed themselves off plausibly to our media-handlers at the gate. (Five genuine net newspeople were later found beaten and strangled in the rabbitbrush twenty miles down the road.) A dozen less presentable Kuinists in unmarked cars were smuggled in as technicians; weapons were effectively hidden amidst a cargo of lenses, broadcast apparatus, and imaging gear.

These people installed themselves on the bluff overlooking the tau core, near the Uniforces observation point. When they saw Hitch bring the last truck up to the bunker, they understood that to mean that the arrival was imminent. They destroyed the Uniforces outpost with an explosive device, picked off any survivors, then focused their efforts on the tau core.

I saw the puffs of smoke from their rifles, faint against the blue sky. They were too far from the core for accurate marksmanship, but sparks flew where their bullets struck the steel frame. Behind us, Uniforces gatekeepers began to return fire and radioed for support. Unfortunately the bulk of the forces were concentrated at the south gate, where the Kuinist mob had begun to fire on them in earnest.

Belatedly, I squatted in the dirt next to Sue. “The core is pretty heavily shielded—”

“The core is, I guess, but the cables and co

She rose and ran for the bunker. I had no choice but to follow, but first I waved in Hitch, who had just arrived and must have confused the gunfire from the bluff with the skirmish to the south of us. But when he saw Sue’s awkward headlong dash he understood the urgency.

The air was suddenly much colder, and a wind came gusting from the dry prairie, dust-devils marching like pilgrims into the heart of the tau event.

Even the heated concrete-lined bunker was colder than Sue had predicted as the thermal shock began to ramp up. It numbed the extremities, cooled the blood, imposed a strange languid slowness on a sequence of terrifying events. We all struggled into thermally-adaptive jackets and headgear as Hitch sealed the door behind him.

Like clockwork, the tau-core initiation process proceeded; like clockwork, it was immune at this point to human intervention. Technicians sat by their monitors with clenched fists, nothing to do but hope a stray bullet didn’t interrupt the flow of data.

I had seen the core’s co

But the militiamen had brought more than rifles.

The countdown clock passed the five-minute point when there was the rumble of a distant detonation. Dust shook down from the plank ceiling and the lights in the bunker winked off.

“Hit a generator,” I heard Hitch say, and someone else howled, “We’re fucking screwed!”

I couldn’t see Sue — I couldn’t see anything at all. The darkness was absolute. There were nearly forty of us crowded into the bunker behind its elaborate earthworks.

Our backup generator had obviously failed. Auxiliary batteries restored the pilot lights on the electronic gear but cast no useful light. Forty people in a dark, enclosed space. I pictured in my mind the entrance, a steel door set at the top of a concrete stepway maybe a yard from where I stood, fixing the direction in my mind.

And then — the arrival.

The Chronolith reached deep into the bedrock.

A Chronolith absorbs matter and does not displace it; but the cold shock fractured hidden veins of moisture, creating a shockwave that traveled through the earth. The floor seemed to rise and fall. Those of us who hadn’t grabbed a handhold fell to the ground. I think everyone screamed. It was a terrible sound, far worse than any physical damage done.