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you then live long?
Britt, with characteristic poise, asked only, "What's on your mind, Kyle?"
Here goes. "It's possible the Krulirim will go home if we ask. Before their arrival they had no reason to
wish Earth ill. That said, there's a small voice whispering in my ear."
He'd just seen a politician at work, flattering Chernykov. "One of my flaws, I freely admit, is the
tendency to view everything through the lenses of science and logic. In my early attempts to influence
government policy, when you first brought me to Washington, I relied too rigorously on logic. I also
crashed and burned far more often than I succeeded. A very wise man" okay, Britt, recognize yourself
here! "eventually got through to me. I now occasionally know enough to ask, 'Can the other guy afford
to live with my logic?' What worries me at this moment is how unclear it is that the Krulirim can afford
to just leave.
"To be brief, I wonder . . . will Swelk's former shipmates accept the risk that what they attempted here
will remain secret? Is that a gamble they can afford to take?"
Doubts were appearing on faces around the table, including, he was relieved to see, on the faces of both
presidents.
"I'm trying to imagine how the conspirators may see their situation. Must they not be asking themselves,
Will we ever be held to account for our actions? What if another Krulchukor ship were to discover
Earth? If humanity refuses to obliterate itself, how soon until Earth's starships are visiting our worlds?
"What if humans and other Krulirim do meet? Our aliens killed the crew of the Atlantis. They've
presumably killed all the people they kidnapped, before their splashy public arrival, to better understand
us. They're responsible for yet more deaths, beginning with the submarine catastrophe. We have film of
their ship at sites across our planet. We have by now millions of the orbs and a wrecked lifeboat from
their ship: technology whose origin they can't refute. In short, the plotters can hardly deny trying to
stampede us to self-genocide."
"Even if we do nuke each other, some records may survive." Britt spoke with his eyes shut, deep in
thought. "And survivors may still speak with future visitors. And that means . . ."
" . . . And that means," completed Kyle, "there's a very real risk whether we blow ourselves up or
not that the ETs planned all along to utterly obliterate humanity before leaving our solar system."
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- Chapter 24
* * *
"Depend on it, sir," Samuel Johnson is said to have remarked, "when a man knows he is to be hanged in
a fortnight, it concentrates his mind wonderfully." The summiteers outside Ankara, eye-to-eye with the
extinction of humanity, found their attention wholly focused. That convergence gave birth, at last, to a
terrifying plan possessed of but a single virtue no one saw any reason why the plan was necessarily
doomed to failure.
Which wasn't to say a failure wasn't likely.
Attempting to destroy the starship was too risky. Ignoring the starship and hoping it would depart in
peace was likewise too risky. And that left . . . capture.
Commandos would strike the next time the starship visited a Russian or an American city.
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Framed
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- Chapter 25
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CHAPTER 25
"I think I misjudged you." Ryan Bauer, a water tumbler full of ice and amber liquid in his hand, flung
himself into the captain's chair across from Kyle. "In a fingernails-across-the-blackboard sort of way,
you're all right."
The borrowed private jet, most specifically not designated Air Force One, was plushly carpeted and
richly appointed. There were no flight attendants aboard, in the interests of the trip's secrecy, but the
Cessna's pantry came stocked for major partying. With the summit over, and serious attack-planning
impossible until they got home, the passengers were taking advantage. "You'll turn my head, General.
Or is it the bourbon speaking?"
"Scotch." Ice cubes tinkled as Bauer downed a healthy swig. "But in a good cause."
"Okay." Kyle had no idea where this was going.
"You're all right," the flyer repeated. "You have a good head on your shoulders and an insane
willingness to speak your mind."
"So what good cause does the Scotch support?"
"My willingness to step onto a plane." Laughing, he nabbed a jumbo shrimp from Kyle's plate. "Not
what you expected, was it."
"Most pilots actually like airplanes."
"It's not that." Bauer leaned forward conspiratorially. "You understand these things. I'll gladly fly after
the Tea Party."
Tea Party was the code name for the as-yet unscheduled assault on the starship. What Kyle failed to
grasp was what he supposedly understood. "Excuse me?"
"Beam weapons." Bauer expropriated another shrimp. "The lasers on the moon use visible-light
frequencies, so that we can see the hologram. They took out the Atlantis and that Proton with microwave
frequencies. The early-warning birds are being fried with X-rays. Why X-rays, do you suppose?"
"Because the atmosphere blocks X-rays. If the aliens had used microwaves, like they did with the
Atlantis, we and the Russians would have had a better chance to see what was really going on, instead of
automatically blaming each other for the saticide. Some of those downward-stabbing microwaves could
have been detected on the ground. We don't have beam weapons in space, and neither do the
Russians . . . as far as we know, anyway."
"Saticide. I like that. Hafta suggest it to someone at the Pentagon." Bauer admired the spectacular alpine
scenery rushing by far below. "Swelk's ugly friends have lasers that are far too tunable for my liking.
Now, whenever I'm flying, I feel like a sitting duck."
Tunable lasers. Microwave beams tuned to an excitation energy for liquid hydrogen had exploded the
fuel tank of the Atlantis. X-rays from the same alien satellites continued to destroy Earth's satellites. The
leisurely pace at which Earth's satellites were targeted had been a mystery. Since Swelk's defection,
Kyle had come to believe it was plot-related. Film plot, that was. Rualf, no friend of Swelk's,
presumably wanted his bugs to capture plenty of suspenseful scenes in the build-up to Armageddon.
"Kyle, buddy. Are you with me?"
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- Chapter 25
Tunable lasers. How separated were the excitation frequencies of liquid hydrogen and jet fuel? They
were surely much closer together than microwaves and X-rays. "Sadly, Ryan, I am with you . . . but
maybe you're not worried enough. Why limit your misgivings to attacks on the jet fuel in planes? What
about petroleum pipelines? Natural-gas storage tanks? Hell, what about ordinary everyday gasoline?"
"Yeah, you're all right." Bauer downed another healthy swig of scotch. "Planning for Tea Party just got a
whole bunch more complicated."
"How so?"
"Because," said Bauer, "you may be right. We and the Russians had better plan to attack all the alien [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]