Deep Freeze

CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

Although deeply wounded and blinded throughout large areas of the core installations, the Watcher was functional. Animated extensions were ripping away the damaged modules and replacing them. Top priority was assigned to repair of the sensors in the halls of the Sleepers. The Watcher could not know the emotion of dismay. There was only an acknowledgment of receipt of data when newly installed circuit boards reported the fact that certain sensors in the halls had been inoperative for an indeterminate but significant length of time.

Monitoring ability fully restored, the Watcher recorded the same reading from ninety-nine percent of all Sleeper units. They were dead.

They had been dead for a period of time that could not be measured. Only a few hundred of the units did not contain the mummified, desiccatedremains of the Creators, those who had been preserved to guard the balance. The hoods of those few hundred units stood open. Power to the nurturing containers had been turned off.

It was the Watcher's function to learn. As the ability to see was restored, there was another discovery. In the fleet storage area half a dozen starships were gone. Someone had tampered with the sensors that kept the Watcher apprised of their state of readiness. For eons the sensors had been reporting false data. It could only be concluded that the few hundred Creators who had been awakened long ago had departed the planet aboard the missing starships, after having rigged the sensors to send erroneous signals.

If the Watcher could have felt emotion, it might very well have known loneliness. They were dead, all the Creators, or they had left long, long ago.

If the Watcher had possessed human qualities, it might even have felt a sense of futility, for it had been guarding nothing more than itself; but the Watcher was a machine, a thinking machine, true, but a machine. It operated with cold, irrefutable logic. It had been created to do a job.

Whether or not the Creators were dead, or gone, had no relationship to the duty that had been assigned to their creation. In fact, it was logical to think that it was the intent of creation, the Creators having proven to be nothing more than fragile flesh and blood, that the eternal creation carry on their work. The balance was in danger at best, had already been impacted beyond redemption at worst. The Watcher had been created to guard the balance. Therefore, it was the Watcher who would restore order to the galaxy.

The number of worlds in the United Planets Sector was considered. As communications links were restored, assignments went out to fleet units.

In subterranean chambers all over the planet startup units drained power until the fusion engines of thousands of small drone ships were humming quietly. From the fusion engines, power was fed to the smaller units that generated the fields that would blend with the planet's far-diffused gravitational waves and make it possible for the ships to move instantly from one point to another on the continuum of the wave. The Watcher calculated routes for each of the ships and checked each of the small, gravity-lock missiles that were the vessels' only weapon.

The small missiles, shaped for driving through atmosphere, represented the highest technological achievement of the Creators. The weapon hadbeen developed as a backup for the Creators' own abilities. It was relatively crude. It could not sterilize a world and leave it rolling in its orbit. It could only fragment and destroy, but the end result was the same.

Somehow a new strain of pre-Creators had spread with totally abnormal swiftness over a sizable segment of the galaxy, overwhelming the balance. The situation would be corrected.

Meanwhile, there remained only one small detail to be handled. Now that the two who had done so much damage were out of the underground complex, they could be handled easily. The power that could not be applied inside the installation, lest function be disrupted in all gravity-driven units, was now available for use again. Before silencing the last two of the trespassers, however, the Watcher would recheck through their minds and the memory of the computer aboard their ship the locations of all U.P. worlds.

Sarah de Conde seemed to exist on two levels. Inside, in quivering, agonized waves that threatened to break through and overwhelm her, was the knowledge that almost everyone she loved was dead. Her husband, her mother and her father, her two brothers and two sisters, all of them were dead at the hands of that thing back there below the ice. In that guise, as bereaved woman, she wanted only to be alone with her sorrow, to let the hot tears come; but she was another person, as well, and in that persona there was fury. She was furious that at some time in the distant past beings very much like herself—if the Watcher was to be credited—had decided that they and they alone had the answers, that in their superiority they had the right not only to exterminate billions of lives in the name of some bullshit theory about the quote "ecology" unquote, and, indirectly, although her father and mother and Joshua and the others were not, of course, known to them, to decide to kill no less than half a dozen members of the Webster family.

She spoke only in answer to direct questions from Vinn as the aircar soared upward and tucked itself into the lock of the Crimson Rose. Vinn, puzzled and alarmed by the lack of response to his calls from Kara Berol, hurried from the lock to the control room, his saffer in hand, to find Kara's body.

"I don't think you want to see this," he told Sarah as she entered thebridge.

"Oh, yes, I do," she said, kneeling beside Kara. This latest death merely fed her fury.

"But how could it reach her here?" Vinn asked.

"If it can do this at such a distance, why was it necessary to lure the others to the surface?"

"I will answer that question before you are silenced," the Watcher said through the ship's communicator. "It was necessary to establish a link between your ship and my instruments before the power could be used.

That link was made when you touched down on the surface."

Vinn felt the beginning of panic. He had a semblance of resistance to the Watcher's penetration of his mind, but he had seen what had been done to Kara and he was frightened. He knew that he was very close to death.

"Watcher," he said, "it's over. Your Creators are dead."

"My duty continues," the Watcher said. "You will activate your computer."

"Do it," Sarah said, her eyes blazing.

Vinn pushed buttons. Sarah leaned past him and wrote on a notepad.

BUSTERS.

He nodded. The computer was ready. The Watcher was there, inside.

Vinn's heart pounded as the spatial coordinates of all U.P. worlds flashed rapidly across the screen. He began to punch buttons himself, holding his breath. One by one the fail-safe barriers to arming the planet busters were negated. Sarah stood by his side, her teeth bared in tension.

"Now I have all the information I need," the Watcher said.

Three steps remained to arm the planet busters.

"Wait," Sarah said. "If you kill us, you will be killing your Creators."

"My Creators are dead."

"Not all of them died," Sarah said, her eyes watching Vinn's fingers as they flew over the keyboard. "Some of them were awakened early. Where did they go? You, yourself, said that our rise was too swift. That puzzled you. But if the Creators who were awakened early settled other planets, wouldn't that explain the fact that I can keep you out of my mind?"

There was a long period of silence as the Watcher deliberated that question. Sarah felt the dizziness indicating that the Watcher was trying to enter her mind. She rejected the effort, her anger giving her strength.

A shrill tone of warning came from the weapons system. A screen flashed. The planet busters were armed and ready. Vinn set about overcoming the firing fail-safes.

"We are your Creators," Sarah said, as she watched Vinn's fingers. "And as your Creators we order you to cease your vigil. Your duty has been done. The balance is not endangered."

"You gutted and ruined your original planet of settlement," the Watcher said.

"We have restored Terra II," Sarah said. "It is true that we used up her resources during the centuries that it took for us to rebuild a technology and to get back into space, but we have healed the scars we left."

"Millions of species perished."

"There was only vegetation on Terra II when our ancestors landed there," Sarah said.

"Only rank weeds grow on your Earth," the Watcher said.

"We saved those who remained, the New Ones, the mutated ones. They are an integrated part of our society, quite valuable, as a matter of fact.

The wrongs that our ancestors did were in the far past," Sarah replied.

"A moment in time," the Watcher said.

Sarah felt belittled by being forced to plead for her life, but it was not her life alone. She was thinking of her children.

"You think that you will persuade me to let you live," the Watcher said.

"That is a vain hope. You, Vinn, you prepare some weapon to be used against me. That too, is futile. You will be ready to fire your puny weapon with two more keystrokes, but before you push the last key you will be dead. Not that your weapon could do more than minor harm. What will you do, destroy another of the freezer units? Blast through the ice and earth in an effort to reach me?"

"Do it," Sarah said.

Vinn punched a key. Now there remained only one final keystroke, a very simple one. He held his finger poised over the key.

"I will show you weapons," the Watcher said, and on the largest screen there appeared an image of a good, blue world. A tiny streak of light slashed down from the darkness of space. For long moments nothing happened, then the planet's crust swelled outward and ruptured.

Both Vinn and Sarah had seen the old film of the destruction of Zede worlds in the last space war. This was the same. The planet fragmented.

The molten core flowed and shattered.

"Thus will I restore the balance," the Watcher said.

"You don't have the means," Vinn said, his finger poised, shaking, over the firing key.

Now the screen showed row after row of small ships. Ports opened.

"I will allow you to see the launching of the fleet before I silence you," the Watcher said.

"Now," Sarah said.

Vinn's finger plunged downward, but before it could touch his entire body went limp as the Watcher detonated power inside his skull so forcefully that the milky soup that had been his brain cracked his skull and forced itself out through the cracks, through his ears, through his nose and mouth and eyes. He sank to the floor.

Sarah screamed.

"Can you resist that?" the Watcher asked. "Can you resist that as you reject my presence?"

"I don't know, you son-of-a-bitch," Sarah said, "but we're going to find out." She moved her finger toward the keyboard. The alarm that warned of the readiness of the planet busters was loud in her ears. The firing light blinked glaring red. She steeled herself for oblivion, felt the Watcher's presence. She stabbed down with her finger and the ship shuddered as the missiles carrying the busters sped away, accelerating under power. She felt pressure inside her head, staggered. The viewscreen showed the two weapons burning a bright downward arc through the thin atmosphere of the ice planet, and then there was nothing.

The Watcher saw the two missiles leaving the orbiting ship and accelerate. Counter missiles blasted, but the oncoming weapons were past them and thundering toward the surface ice before the planet's defenses could react.

No matter. The damage would be minimal, even if the invaders had armed their insignificant weapons with thermonuclear warheads. That, the Watcher reasoned, would be the limit of the technical ability of the trespassers.

But why wasn't the woman dead?

Sarah sat up. Her hand went to her forehead. Her head ached fiercely.

She looked up at the screen. She had not been unconscious long, for the busters were still driving down through atmosphere. She knew that on-board instruments were taking the measure of the planet. She knew, also, that she was in grave danger because she was too near. She was the last one left. Someone should go back to tell the story to X&A's scientists, but it was not duty to mankind that motivated her to live. Everyone was dead. Poor Vinn was dead. Only her children were left. That thing down there had taken from her everything but her children, and she was not going to let it take them from her through her death.

She was not sure that she was doing it right as she punched in a short blink. Even though she was in danger of dying with the Watcher's planet,she wanted to see that thing down there die, or, more properly, be silenced. She pushed the button and the Crimson Rose disappeared even as the onboard computers caused the diving missiles to vanish as well.

The Rose came back into normal space at a distance of two hundred thousand miles. It took Sarah a few seconds to activate the screens.

The ice planet swam serenely in the darkness of space, sun side reflecting light glaringly. Sarah adjusted the optics, compensating for the glare. She was able to see the first swelling of the icy crust. Not one but two weapons designed to destroy a world had blinked instantly to the planet's core.

The red of molten metal was seen briefly as the world shattered from the inside out. There was steam as ice melted and then the planet simply disintegrated into flying chunks of rock and cooling core material.

Sarah was breathing rapidly. Her head ached.

"You killed my mother, my father, my brothers and sisters," she whispered to the dying world. "You killed my husband and my friends."

She believed in a divinity, if not in the preachers who took it upon themselves to be spokesmen for God. She prayed, as she watched the particles of the deep freeze planet go their separate ways, that those who had made the Watcher were now burning in an old-fashioned Christian hell.

She buried Vinn and Kara in space, sending them off toward the sun with the words of the ancients. She spent a few hours making sure she understood the process of locking onto a distant blink beacon. The Crimson Rose's generator was fully charged when she punched a button and, with a sigh of relief, found that the ship lay quite near the first of the Rimfire beacons.

She was going home. It would be up to X&A to worry about whether or not there were other Watchers. She had things to do. She found it difficult to believe that she'd left her children in the care of others for so long, even if they were with her closest friends. She knew, rationally, that she had been influenced by the Watcher's spatial extensions, but that was no excuse. Her first duty was to her children.

And then there was the election that would be coming up in less thanfour years. If she started her campaign very soon after getting back home, she'd be in fine shape to be elected. She had three young ones in T-Town schools. They deserved the best education available and she intended to see that they got it. After all, they would need all the knowledge they could absorb to insure that the human race would survive if the U.P. worlds ever encountered the Sleepers who had long ago awakened and vanished.