Zone Yellow

Chapter 7

Manfred von Richtofen leaned across his big desk to shake my hand warmly, after he’d returned Helm’s salute. I introduced Dr. Smovia, who gave Manfred a terse briefing on his findings, then went off to cook up more viral culture.

“A vaccine, you say?” Richtofen inquired dubiously. “What―?”

“These creatures are swarming in here faster than our forces and the disease combined can kill them, sir,” I pointed out. “We can’t stay strictly on the defensive; we have to counter-attack.”

Manfred nodded doubtfully. “We’ve traced their C.H. date,” he told us. “Over one hundred million years, Brion, and in Zone Yellow at that.”

We both turned to look at the Net map that covered one wall. It showed the large irregularly-shaped cross-section of A-lines so far explored by the Imperium, with an overlaid grid, and a blue line outlining the area in which the Imperial government claimed sovereignty. At dead center, the Zero-zero line―the home-world―was indicated by a scarlet dot. Nearby were three more red dots, all included within the big pink blotch of the Blight―the area of desolate, abnormal world-lines overwhelmed by the runaway entropic energies disastrously released by the near-analogs there of Maxoni and Cocini, whose work had succeeded only here, and had been guided past catastrophe only here and in the three Blight Insular Lines.

I knew little about Zone Yellow, a second area of ruined A-lines, analogous to the Blight, but not associated with it, except for the news that it was Ylokk home-area.

“Sir,” I offered, “we have to hit back.” Manfred looked at me grimly. “We’ve surrounded their main point of entry,” he said as if I hadn’t spoken. “The warehouse off Strandvagen. I’m planning a raid, and―”

“No mass attack is necessary, sir. When I dump this vial in their water supply―”

It was his turn to butt in. “I―I cannot in conscience dispatch a lone man into an interdicted and totally unknown region of the Net, Brion. Especially my most valued and experienced officer. No, I need you here.”

I was drawing a breath to rebut that when the roof fell in, quite literally. A chunk of concrete the size of a pool table smashed Richtofen’s desk flat, knocking him back in a cloud of plaster dust. Ripped-loose wiring sparked and cracked, and in a few seconds, fire was flickering among the dumped papers from a burst filing cabinet. Helm grabbed my arm and pulled me back. I hurriedly told him I was all right―and I was, except for the ringing in my ears and some choking dust in my lungs. He found Smovia, dazed, slumped in a corner, and got him on his feet. I went back into the smoke and hauled Manfred out. He was semi-conscious, but not hurt.

“It appears,” he said when he’d caught his breath, “that our decision is academic. If they’ve brought up their big guns―their disruptors can easily be built to any size desired―we needn’t concern ourselves with counterattack. We’ll have our hands full surviving.”

There were people in the room by then, yelling conflicting orders at each other. I got the attention of a senior colonel and suggested he try to get everybody to calm down and wait for orders. While I was telling him this, he was telling me that the blast had been due to a low-flying aircraft of alien design, an ornithopter like a giant dragonfly.

Manfred was dusty, but unhurt. He said, “Dismissed!” and the mob went silent and disappeared.

“I’ll get in there, sir,” I assured him. “All I have to do is watch the instruments.”

“I don’t like it,” Richtofen grumped. “It’s been twenty years since we so much as conducted a reconnaissance at such a distance, and as you well know, it came to grief. No, Zone Yellow is off limits. The technical people aren’t sure we can penetrate it, and once in, there can be no return: the entropic gradient is too steep. Any plan to counterattack is, all too apparently, impractical. Accordingly, we must wage the war here, on our own territory.”

“I studied one of the Ylokk machines,” I told him. “There are a couple of tricks we can employ. I’d like permission to modify a three-man scout and give it a try.”

Manfred nodded absently, “The warehouse we’ve surrounded…” It was as if he hadn’t heard a word I’d said.

“Excuse me, General, I think we have to tackle this thing at its source. I can make it work―”

“No, Brion. I cannot allow this. No, I need you here. We need you here. Barbro, waiting at Sigtuna―who knows what may have befallen her by now? No, no,” he reversed field. “No doubt she and her people are holding their own…”

“All the more reason I have to do something, sir,” I insisted. All of a sudden I was eager to get going. “I can draw equipment and be on the way in half an hour.”

“Not alone!” Richtofen snapped.

“I seem to recall, sir,” I countered, “in the old days you did your best work when you were alone.”

“I was young and foolish,” he grumped. “My flying circus was superb! I suppose I liked to roam the skies over France apart from the Staffel partly from egoistic impulses: Alone, the victory was indisputably mine!”

“This isn’t an ego trip, General,” I assured him.

“Then why do you propose to go alone?”

“Not quite alone, sir,” I put in. “I need Dr. Smovia and Lieutenant Helm.”

“Little enough help in an emergency,” Manfred snapped.

“I want to be inconspicuous,” I reminded him. “The idea is to sneak in, dump the virus culture in their water supply, and duck back out.”

“In Zone Yellow, Brion?” He pressed the point. “You’re as aware as I that the entropic gradient at such a distance is insurmountable!”

“Theory, sir,” I rebutted. “I think it can be done. I’ll need to watch my latent-temporal drain very closely, and keep the entropic gradient in the green.”

After a thoughtful pause, the General made a gesture of resignation. “I see you’ve set your mind on this mad escapade, my friend,” he conceded. “Think of all you’ll be risking.”

“Don’t talk me out of it, sir,” I pled. “I’m not really happy about it―it’s just that it has to be done.”

He literally threw up his hands. “Very well, then, Colonel. You’ll have the best equipment we have. I’ll call Sjolund.” He did so.

I got Manfred out of the building and into his big Saab limo, where his driver, a spidery little fellow named Ole (pronounced oo-luh) was waiting, ignoring the panic all around him. I got in front.

“Drive me to Strandvagen, Ole,” Richtofen directed him. The big car oozed along the bumpy cobbled street like syrup flowing over waffles, and we pulled up in front of the big, glitzy Intercontinental Hotel, formerly an abandoned ship’s chandler’s warehouse. Security men were ten deep around it, but they waved their boss through with no delay.

“There’s a brick vault under the building,” he told me. “Dates back to the sixteenth century. Very stable. They’ve taken it over as their staging depot. They’re bringing in troops in battalion lots at six-hour intervals. Easy target, except for the jet-set tenants directly above. They haven’t been bothered, except for some nightmares, it seems. Leakage from the Ylokk version of the M-C drive.”

“Too bad,” I commented. “We can’t have our telly stars and playboys dreaming they had to go to work.”

“It’s no joke, Brion,” Manfred reprimanded me. “General von Horst lives there, and so does Crmblnski, the chap who developed the Holauto-some, you know. Very popular fellow. Could hardly ask him to move out so we could blow up his art collection.”

“That ‘holauto’ gadget is the one that lets you control and record REM dreams, isn’t it?”

“Precisely; the opiate of the masses,” Richtofen replied without approval. “As you know, it’s made Crmblnski a popular hero.”

“We’d better evacuate them anyway,” I commented.

Manfred shook his head. “Some of these people have spent millions of kronor and half their lives in assembling collections of bric-a-brac and evolving a suitable environment for showing it off―except that nobody’s allowed to see them. We’d have to evict them forcibly.”

I looked at him to see if he was joking. He wasn’t.

“We’d better start now, General,” I told him. “Look! Here comes another batch of reinforcements.” A column of ten rats abreast was filing out of the old loading shed, cleaner and snappier than the ones I’d seen, and ready to take on a world―our world.

“We can’t keep on stacking corpses forever, General,” I pointed out. A few shouts rang out and rat-men fell out of ranks, formed up in a column of twos, and headed off down the street. They made no attempt to assume an offensive formation, or even a defensive one; just marched as if they were on a parade ground. Maybe they were; a strange heavy vehicle with a staff-car look had eased around the corner and pulled up by the shed.

“There’s our target, General,” I said, and started to get out of the car.

Richtofen waved me back as he spoke into his talker. “One round from the eighty-eight, Colonel,” he directed crisply. “I want a direct hit,” he added. “There’s no room for a ranging shot.”

“Can’t have the people upstairs getting the idea there’s a war on,” I agreed. The shot was fired, and the car was enveloped in a raging ball of dust, which blew away to reveal the vehicle, apparently unharmed.

“You see our problem, Colonel,” Richtofen said. “It appears they’ve responded to our high explosives and projectiles by developing a variation of the disruptor principle to contain and absorb explosions. Incredibly fast work! We’re facing a formidable foe, make no mistake, Colonel!”

This was getting serious. He’d called me “Colonel” twice in one breath. He called me by my rank only when things were really sticky.

“Suppose I sneak up and let the air out of their tires,” I suggested in a mock-conspiratorial tone, but Manfred was in no mood for my sense of humor. Neither was I. Of course, I had already reported the tank-traveler I’d briefly captured; we were surprised we hadn’t seen more. There were only the foot soldiers, but there were a lot of them. Someone had said three million: Intelligence had upped its estimate to four million, in Stockholm and elsewhere, give or take a few hundred thousand, with more arriving every second.

“We’re losing ground fast.” Manfred smacked his palm with his fist. “We need to do something, dammit!” Actually, he said “devil” or its Swedish equivalent, which is as close as the Swedish language can come to swearing. He seldom spoke German; he’d been here ever since his forced landing in 1917. He gave me an angry look and said, “No, Brion; I can see no alternative at the moment. But surely a large unit capable of carrying a ten-man strike team would be best.”

“Sorry to disagree, sir,” I said. “I don’t want to go out in a blaze of glory attempting the impossible: challenging a nation with a handful of suicide-squaders. I want to slip in with no fanfare and do what needs to be done. According to this Swft, they’re in desperate condition already. What I have in mind―”

“Very well,” Richtofen cut me off. “As you wish, but I’m doubtful―very doubtful―that your approach will succeed. Instead, I fear I’ll simply lose my best officer.”

“Plus a couple of other fellows,” I said.

I sent Helm off to requisition some issue rations, and get back ten minutes ago.

He took off at a run, and I got back down to business. There was no time to waste. Dr. Smovia had gone off to talk to our medical people.

“Manfred, if I don’t make it, I know you’ll see to it that Barbro is well taken care of.” He nodded gruffly, and on that note we went to the Net garages.

The former car barn near Stallmastareg&rden still looked like a car barn; even the streetcar tracks were still in place, used for moving cargo carts. The original old-fashioned gold and blue streetcars had been shipped to Lima, Peru, years ago. I hoped they were well taken care of. There was a neat brick walk beside a trimmed hedge leading to the personnel door under a row of linden trees. We went back.

It was a big, echoey space, with little office-cubicles along one side, and half a dozen shuttles of various shapes and sizes parked across the orange-painted floor with a ruled three-foot grid of white lines, helpful in pinpointing positions of the vehicles when it was necessary to shift into tight quarters at the destination.

We stood for a moment just inside the personnel entry, and looked at the technical people swarming over, under, and around the travelers, some with a plain packing-crate look, others disguised as heavy trucks or buses, two or three gotten up in heavy war-hulls that looked like what they were: our latest Mark XX all-terrain tanks, with enough armament to blast their way out of any situation.

“A Mark III, I think,” Manfred said as if suggesting it.

I shook my head, though he wasn’t looking at me. “My idea, sir,” I said, trying not to sound dogged, “is to sneak in there unnoticed and work quietly.”

He nodded. “As you wish, Brion. Personally, I don’t think anything you, a single man, can do will bring to heel a nation of invaders whose own world is in a state of chaos, judging from your report.”

“Maybe it won’t work,” it was my turn to concede, “but maybe it will. Raw force won’t. And I won’t be quite alone; Lieutenant Helm and Doctor Smovia will be with me.”

Sjolund and a bunch of technicians were in a huddle around an innocuous-looking lift-van, a wooden crate stout enough to be hoisted, fully loaded, aboard ship without collapsing. I went over. A young fellow named Rolf saw us first and came to attention.

“Zone Yellow, eh, sir?” he queried, but not as though he didn’t know the answer. I looked inside the van. It would be cramped for three, but it would do.

“They volunteered?” Manfred inquired punctiliously. I nodded. I hadn’t given them much of a chance not to, but if they didn’t want to go, all they had to do was get accidently delayed in their errands. Helm was as gung ho as they came; I wasn’t worried about that. As for Smovia, he was so wrapped up in the medical ramifications, he wouldn’t notice where he was.