Gradisil (GollanczF.) Page 20

  With a snap and a twang, Slater comes to a stop.

  ‘d’up Jean, doing good,’ replies Slater. This mutual greeting is a sort of joke between them. Because the habitation portions of the Fort are so very small, the staff bump into one another a hundred times a day, at least, and so these elaborate social interchanges are redundant. Which is why these two men perform them, of course.

  ‘Where you going?’ asks Philp. ‘We’re going to war,’ says Slater. This is also the standard exchange.

  ‘Hey, don’t let the man keep you,’ says Philpot. The man, in this context, is their commanding officer, General Niflheim. ‘You tell him that you-me got time booked to go outside, try the new rifles out.’

  ‘And I have not forgotten that,’ says Slater.

  And with a snap and a twang he is off.

  During this conversation Fort Glenn has travelled several hundred kilometres. It’s a hurtling place. Its speed is not apparent to those on the inside.

  The rear-wall motor barks, chugs, and pulses for twenty seconds. Air circulates. The motor ceases, and it is quiet again.

  Slater knoks at the general’s door, and the metallic door rebounds against his meaty knukles. Not only the door, but the metal frame that holds it, and the metal walls in which the frame itself is set, and which angle away ninety degrees to enclose the general’s room and the corridor - all these surfaces act as a sounding board, and Slater’s knok booms mightily through the whole Fort. Everybody knows that Slater is knoking.

  ‘Come,’ says the general.

  These niceties, the hello-goodbye, the knoking-at-doors, these are all holdovers from the ground. The Army is by its nature an organisation that clings to its routines and rituals as far as possible. You might think that, given the space limitations of the Fort, it is an unnecessary extravagance of space for the general to have a personal cabin, a storage cell and a private office, as well as a cabin for his subaltern. But he is a general, after all.

  Slater pulls the door open and with a snap and a twang steps into the general’s office. The window behind the general’s desk shows a good stretch of the world, sunlit and glorious. It’s the whole world, you believe that? Wat a view! Wat a view this man has from his office window!

  A storm front, curled around a low-grade hurricane, has drawn a spiral galaxy of cloud over Siberia. The eye of this weather-cluster sits south of the Earth’s pole like the nubbin on an orange the size of the world. Through the cloud tatters at the outer rim of this storm front brown and olive landscape is visible, and the little tin-coloured scabs of industrial parks or cities here and there.

  Slater clunks his booted feet onto the metal dek smartly and salutes. One thing about these elastic boot tethers; if you bend your knee up far enough they enable you to really clunk your boot hard down, which makes the whole military, stand-to-attention, yes-sah! thing so very much sharper.

  ‘Sir!’ says Slater.

  The general himself is working at his desk; but he is standing, since in zero g standing is precisely as easy and comfortable as sitting. For this same reason Slater does not take a seat.

  The general and the lieutenant have a conversation. Implicit in the things they say are certain facts, known to both of them and unneedful of repetition between them, but things which make sense of the exchange. Amongst those facts, the most salient are as follows: that the upkeep of this Fort is costing the American taxpayers a great deal of money, and increasingly people regard this expense as a waste of cash, for many politicians do not see the need for a military presence in the Uplands, now (which is to say, after ’81) that the EU has been thoroughly beaten and has withdrawn itself from those territories. It is true that the civilian population of the Uplands has continued to increase - exentrics, millionaires, wealthy criminals looking for a hideaway, cranks, plane-nuts, space-nuts, hermits, libertarians, romantics, a real mixed bag. But, in the opinion of the most influential groundling politicians, these people do not constitute (in the quaint old phrase) a clear and present danger. Maybe they need policing. Surely they don’t need a hugely expensive military operation, permanent base, billions of dollars annually, to keep them loyal to the USA, especially when loyalty to that monopower is only notionally required. For wat is there in the Uplands? How many natural resources are there to be exploited and shipped bak down to enhance the prosperity of ground-born Americans? None.

  Wat are the strategic benefits of that territory? None that haven’t been benefiting the USA for a century and a half already, without the need for an expensive military presence - which is to say, Clarke orbit slots for satellites, surveillance and communication and weapon bases. The satellites are there; they were there for a century before any garrison was posted to defend them, and they did very well, thank you. They are well defended with automatic systems. Uplanders stay away from them, which is easily done in billions of cubic kilometres of space. So why, exactly, precisely, do we need to maintain a garrison up there? Precisely wat are the American people getting for their investment? Nothing.

  General Niflheim and Lieutenant Slater, of course, disagree with this assessment. So does the Army as a whole. The Army as a whole is unpersuaded by the money argument. It has never been persuaded by the money argument (for in the heart of every soldier is the unchallenged belief that - after all, why would any nation accumulate national wealth in the first place except to support a large and glorious army?). The top brass want more, not less, US military presence in the Uplands. It wants to expand the Uplands Corps, and create new corps for subsequent expansion into the solar system.

  But new technology has rendered at least some of the older arguments redundant, which makes it harder for the top brass in their bikerings with the administration. Under the old model the idea was that a space installation was a necessary way Station to further exploration; that having hauled oneself out of the Earth’s gravitational well it would be necessary to pause, rest and recuperate before launching further out, like a weightlifter propping the massy laden bar on his collar bone before the final jerk and up. But this is the logic of rokets! And rokets are old news. Elem planes sweep up so effortlessly into high orbits. Even more elegantly, the newer planes, fitted with their Quanjet motors, can glide through vacuum itself above and beyond the branches of the Yggdrasil - though they require quite enormous amounts of power to move themselves along, and are accordingly much more, so much more expensive to operate than the older Elem craft (though not quite as expensive as rokets).

  And so the problem facing the military is this one: how to create a sense that a military base in the Uplands is an ungainsayable necessity for the security of the American peoples? And the answer that the military grope towards is the same as it has ever been, and the answer is war, it has always been war. The sort of destabilising questions that are aimed at the Army in peacetime become impertinences in wartime. War, once the initial momentum has been established, creates its own justifications. You know this. Just as they do. It’s well known. But the difficult part is in establishing the proper grounds in the first place.

  The general and the lieutenant do not rehearse these points; they have no need, for they both know them all already. Instead, the general says: ‘Is it the midday plane?’

  ‘Colonel Philpot and I have booked some time, sir, to go outdoors and try the new rifles. Booked last week.’

  ‘That’s right,’ says the general. ‘That’s right.’

  ‘At ten, sir. Outside at ten, so the midday plane is fine. I’ll make that plane fine.’

  ‘Hagen and Walsall are on that plane.’

  ‘Yes sir.’

  ‘So it’s definitely-Ionly mean, lieutenant, that it is leaving at midday, it’s a scheduled flight now. Capiche?’ For his own reasons, ignorance or caprice, the general pronounces this last word as kapitchy.

  ‘Yes sir, I understand.’ Wat he understands is don’t tarry, for if you do not make the plane by midday you’ll miss the plane.

  ‘And you got your - you know - ready? You
ready with your . . . ?’ The word the general is groping for and not finding is presentation.

  ‘My presentation, yes sir, I got it all in my thumb.’ By thumb he means not flesh-and-blood, he means his data storage device, tagged to his shirt just underneath his uniform jaket. He pluks this out to show the general.

  ‘Just run it past me again. Not the specifix . . . just the . . .’ This sentence does not come to an end.

  The general is a big man, his jowls and his nek-fat slak in the no-gravity which gives him a weirdly bulbous look. His head is shaven, which makes plain a single thorn-shaped scar on his temple. His plump eyes, his nose with its golf-ball tip, his ω-shaped chin, his toothbrush eyebrows, all the furniture of his face seems uneasy without the arrow of orientation that gravity provides, taking wat might be a rather handsome and distinctive visage and muppetising it, giving the impression that the various facial elements do not belong intrinsically to that skull but might be attached and detached at whim. But although he personally dislikes zero g, although he is not personally enjoying his posting, the general nevertheless believes genuinely, believes passionately, in the rightness of the Upland Corps being there. ‘Run it past me again,’ says the general.

  The sun comes into the window, painful-bright, and the smartglas darkens automatically. Slater can see his own reflection, floating there. He is a handsome man. He likes the way he looks. He really has no problem with the way he looks.

  ‘It’s pretty much wat we’ve discussed,’ he says. ‘The threat, to play up the threat, yes, but above all the strategy. It’ll be a house-to-house operation, just like a ground city; and our guys are tiptop-trained in house-to-house. The Uplands have unusual features, of course. If you said to me, sir,’ Slater is warming to his topic, ‘to take a ground city I’d take the key features first. I’d send in shok troops to seize the airports, the TV studios, the parliament buildings, and so on. I’d drop troops to grab the high ground, to give us a commanding perspective. Then I’d work street to street, moving up the river and outwards. But — ’

  ‘But,’ repeats the general, who knows all this, but wants to make sure his subordinate has it all ready for the downbelow meeting.

  ‘But there are no such features in the Upland. There’s no airport, TV studios, parliament buildings, no river, no hills, nothing. Just a whole bunch of empty space and a couple thousand houses . . .’

  The general holds up one of his rectangular forefingers. ‘Precision plays, lieutenant,’ he says. ‘Precision always plays downstairs.’

  ‘Twenty thousand and ninety houses,’ says Slater, ‘supporting a population that varies, at any given moment, from fifty to ninety thousand. But it’s a fundamentally itinerant population; almost all of them have ground bases to which they go regularly, to reverse the bone loss and avoid radiation. Only a few hermits stay up all the time, and they’re not healthy. Plus, of course, it’s a population without a standing army, without a centralised government, so it has no unity. Militarily, it’ll be an easy business occupying and subduing the population.’

  The general nods. This is good. ‘And if they ask: hek soldier! haven’t we already subdued this population?’

  ‘It’s true that we have no ground rivals for this territory. But the Uplanders have proved disinclined to accept our dominance.’

  ‘So we want to insist.’

  ‘We want to make them accept that we’re in charge, yes, sir.’

  ‘And if they ask, so why should we pay for this little adventure?’

  Slater grins. ‘If we treat the Uplands as a country, then it has the highest proportion of billionaires anyway. They’ll pay for their own military occupation - for their defence, I mean.’

  ‘Defence,’ says the general, a little severely. ‘Defence is always the word.’

  ‘They’ll pay,’ says Slater, ‘and hardly notice it. But we can’t enforce a proper regimen of taxation without a more robust military presence. At the moment they’re legally required to pay a minimal tax on property held up here, but almost none of them do and there’s no enforcement to make it happen. A two-week military operation, the public capitulation of the two dozen most prominent Uplanders, and a sweep through the whole area fitting state-registering transponders, and we can enforce a legal tax sweep. It’ll pay for the operation, and our presence here, tenfold.’

  ‘Stress that,’ says the general. ‘They’ll like to hear that. And wat else - Moon?’

  ‘The Moon base is a folly,’ says the lieutenant. ‘It’s dying already. It’s practically dead already. The thing is, Uplanders are really wedded to Elem, which means that they’re much more comfortable in the Upland shell of space. None of them have Quanters. Travelling away from the Earth means using some really primitive propulsion, and it’s time-consuming, and it’s expensive, and it leaves them feeling vulnerable. The founder died last year, moonbase-guy I mean. People go less and less, which means the greenhouses die, it’s all going to wrak and ruin. So we can disregard the Moon.’

  ‘Stress that too,’ says the general. ‘The Moon would require a force of Quanters, and that’s pricey, they’re pricey, so stress that we can conduct the whole campaign Elem, in the Uplands themselves.’

  ‘Sir.’

  The general is nodding. ‘Very good,’ he says. Behind him his window is clearing, to reveal the nightside of the Earth glinting and sparkling and rotating like the most titanic bauble ever fashioned; a million points of yellow and white light spekling its broad, coally, rotating torso.

  Slater’s New Gun

  Slater and Philpot strip, peel off their all-body elastics, and suit up. Their suits are striped red and white, their helmets white-stars-on-blue, but the white is reflective and the red a lumine colour, so a spacewalking US marine is visible hundreds of klims away, and when the sun hits them just right they can be seen as tiny pink asterisks in the sky, even from the ground.

  Inside the fabric of the suits an Elem wire is coiled around legs and torso, and powered from a pak in the small of the bak. It would slosh under gravity, since the envelope formed by the two main layers of plascloth is filled with water, but in zero g this is equally distributed and moves slik as oil. The water is insulating, and the water is drinkable, and the water is breakdownable to supplement the oxygen-wedge situated across the small of the bak, should that becomes necessary (which it won’t, on this occasion, because they’re only going out for an hour or so). The water provides some small protection against radiation too, though it is only a thin layer, so not much. And the antifreeze makes it taste funny, should the drinking thing become necessary.

  They step into the porch together. They are laughing together.

  And it’s ssshhh as the air is pumped bak, the air is suked into the Fort, and the suits become a little stiffer in the arms and legs, just a little bit stiffer, but the elbows and knees and the crotch and the armpits are sewn-in with smart cloth that makes flexing and unflexing just that tiny bit easier than it would otherwise be.

  Slater and Philpot both take a rifle from a rak fixed to the side of the porch. These are two of the new batch of rifles, long bore and Very High Speed projectile ordnance. Vacuum rifles can fire bullets at a much higher speed than rifles in air; a very minimal magnetic charge keeps the bullet from scraping the sides of the barrel as it flies along, the lak of air means that the bullet does not deform or bang or get slowed down by air resistance.

  These new VHS-rifles have a refined mag bore, and a more powerful explosive in the bullets. According to the manufacturers they can fire projectiles at extraordinary speeds.

  Slater and Philpot want to try these new guns out. The door opens, and a little dust and glitter (from the minimal residual air in the porch, don’t you see) flutters through the door into the great dark outside. Slater and Philpot float through the door, being careful not to bang their rifles. That’s one problem with these VHS-rifles; the slightest knok to their two-metre barrels and they can become kinked, much less effective, or even wholly ineffective.

/>   Both Lieutenant Slater and Colonel Philpot are tall men; but on a shorter person these red-white hoops are fattening, can make a person look stumpy.

  Dam. Fuk! It takes the breath away. The world is simply larger and more real than screen representations ever suggest.

  They can see the whole Fort now, as they float away, great cylindrical and elliptical components fitted together like supercost Lego, with spiderweb wing work of braided wire to manoeuvre and to preserve it against orbital decay. They move away from it.

  They are talking to one another via a direct-sight laser, which, providing it strike the material of their suits, enables them to communicate without having to broadcast - since howsoever well encrypted, broadcasts are not private: they can be pikked up by Uplanders and maybe decoded, they can be piked up by the whole wide rainy-stony Earth which is just there, which is right there, fuk, it’s fifteen miles away, it’s closer than Boston is to Harvard - there’s the whole world and they might be eavesdropping on you, you don’t know.