Find the Changeling Read online

  FIND THE CHANGELING

  Gregory Benford

  www.sfgateway.com

  Enter the SF Gateway …

  In the last years of the twentieth century (as Wells might have put it), Gollancz, Britain’s oldest and most distinguished science fiction imprint, created the SF and Fantasy Masterworks series. Dedicated to re-publishing the English language’s finest works of SF and Fantasy, most of which were languishing out of print at the time, they were – and remain – landmark lists, consummately fulfilling the original mission statement:

  ‘SF MASTERWORKS is a library of the greatest SF ever written, chosen with the help of today’s leading SF writers and editors. These books show that genuinely innovative SF is as exciting today as when it was first written.’

  Now, as we move inexorably into the twenty-first century, we are delighted to be widening our remit even more. The realities of commercial publishing are such that vast troves of classic SF & Fantasy are almost certainly destined never again to see print. Until very recently, this meant that anyone interested in reading any of these books would have been confined to scouring second-hand bookshops. The advent of digital publishing has changed that paradigm for ever.

  The technology now exists to enable us to make available, for the first time, the entire backlists of an incredibly wide range of classic and modern SF and fantasy authors. Our plan is, at its simplest, to use this technology to build on the success of the SF and Fantasy Masterworks series and to go even further.

  Welcome to the new home of Science Fiction & Fantasy. Welcome to the most comprehensive electronic library of classic SFF titles ever assembled.

  Welcome to the SF Gateway.

  Contents

  Title Page

  Gateway Introduction

  Contents

  Part One

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Part Two

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Part Three

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Part Four

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Part Five

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Website

  Also By Gregory Benford

  Dedication

  Author Bio

  Copyright

  Part One

  1

  It was a sound like fingernails on tin, scraping and shrieking and filling the cabin with harsh harmonics. Fain’s face twisted.

  He glanced to the side. Skallon was grimacing, lines of strain carved in his young features.

  If this went on—

  Fain fired the retros. The sudden slam rattled his teeth. He felt a new surge of acceleration. The cowling that sheltered the nose had blown away. Abruptly the screeching wail vanished. A howling followed. Primary skin blown, Fain thought.

  “What…what was…”

  “It used a particle beam on our nose. Carved it up pretty good. I blew the retros to shake the cowling loose.”

  “CommCen said the Changeling didn’t know how to use those subsystems.”

  “Yeah.” Fain listened to the second skin burning away: a crisp sound, like frying bacon. He had an amped acoustic tap-in, so it came through loud and clear. Acoustics were the most reliable way to judge your entry characteristics. The turbulence-compensated airfoil scorched away at a rate dictated by the need for speed, not safety. It was a rough ride.

  The shuddering roar in his aft sensors rose in pitch. High, higher—the second shell roasted away.

  Fain grimaced. The entry shells peeled off and filled the sky around them with metal-coated plasta-form, confusing radar, and exosense detectors. Good. Each fragmenting shell complicated the Changelings problem.

  They had damned near caught the Changeling up above, in orbit. It hadn’t expected them. They had boosted out from Earth as soon as CommCen got clear word that the Changelings would try for this particular world. There had barely been time to roust Skallon and get him into gear. He was the planetary mission backup, in case they missed the Changeling in space.

  Which they had, barely. They flickered out of trans-light just beyond missile range. The Changeling’s capsule had dipped into the Alvean atmosphere. Now they had to follow the thing down, coming in fast and sleek, massing high, to try to nail the Changeling before it could touch down.

  It was somewhere below, its ballistics system struggling to pick their capsule out from the shower of junk. It was. quick and smart. It had found them with that ion beam, and cut away a lot of their safety margin by destroying the heavy cowling. But now it was time for, a reply.

  Fain thumbed in the offensive weapons systems. Below them in the murky alien atmosphere the tri-Dopplered screen showed a snowstorm of images-drifting flakes of sloughed-off entry shells, phantom debris, evasion missiles scooting sideways, luminous and misleading. One was the Changeling.

  Fain repped and primed his launcher. He picked a target near the center of the metallic snowstorm. Radar could do only so much. Then you had to make a smart guess. He hit the launch command.

  Thunk. “Hey!” Skallon shouted. ‘That sounded like—

  “It was.”

  “Look, introducing weapons of Class IV into Alvea’s subspace—”

  “Yeah, I know. CommCen ruled that out. But they’re not here right now and we are. And that thing down there threw an ion bolt at us.”

  “I don’t like it. The natives will see it and—”

  “And ignore it, probably. Sit tight.”

  The missile spat plasma out the back, making a red image on his exosense screens. It homed swiftly. The snowflake images drifted to the right—

  The A-burst flowered, bright and hot.

  “Jesus!” Skallon cried. “How big was the tip?”

  “Ten kilotons. Implosion-boosted stuff.”

  An ionized cloud spread, obliterating the triDopplered snowflakes in a blue mist. Fain looked away from the multicolored array, hoping this was the end of it. A neat, surgical job—that was what he wanted. Then they could land, call the mothership in orbit above, and boost the hell out of here on the translight carrier.

  He watched the blossoming nuke burst. At the center were spikes of red, denoting objects caught in the blast. At this range they blended into a sullen ball like a bonfire. Fain thought of flame and burning and suddenly of a man spilling forward, his clothes leaping orange with licking, eating flames. The man was yelling, screaming something that Fain could not make out through the hollow roar of the flames that ate away, ate and scorched and blackened everything—the flames—the flames—

  He shook his head. No.

  The picture faded. He had to concentrate on the screen. He gazed deep into the cloud, looking for the telltale ionization traces of heavy metals. That would show where the capsule had been vaporized, bursting open, cracking the Changeling like an egg.

  But there were none. The missile had missed.

  “Shit!” Fain barked, slamming his hand against th
e console. Now the debris cloud itself would screen the Changeling from any further launches. They would have to follow him down.

  “I’ve got the ribbon chutes ready,” Skallon said mildly.

  “Okay.” Fain grimaced, angry at himself. With a rattling bang the first chute deployed. Three times Fain’s weight slammed against his spine. He breathed raggedly. Somewhere a loose component crashed into a bulkhead. The capsule air had an acrid taste.

  He glanced backward to check on Scorpio. The neodog was strapped in tight. Its eyes were glazed from the acceleration and its tongue lolled. “You okay, boy?”

  “All. Right. Wery. Heawy.” His mouth could not shape some sounds under this acceleration, but Fain was used to Scorpio’s accent. They had worked together before. They had captured a Changeling five years before on Revolium, a Godawful waterworld. Fain had failed on a recent mission precisely because he didn’t have a neodog with him, and he was damned if he would let that happen to him again. This job should be easier than the Revolium deal, anyway. It was easier to kill a Changeling than to capture it. A Changeling could make you look like a fool if you tried to be too subtle. A quick kill was clean and more satisfying.

  “Looks like a tough job,” Skallon said.

  “We’ll scrag him on the ground.”

  Fain felt the ribbon chute rip away. A second popped out; another surge of acceleration. The nuke hadn’t been a total waste, at least. The Changeling was below it now, so his up-looking sensors couldn’t find them in the sky. They could ride down safely. Still—

  Fain fired another missile. “Hey!” Skallon cried. “What—”

  “Insurance.”

  “But you’re dropping it to within a hundred kilometers of Kalic!”

  ‘That’s the place the games theory execs said the Changeling would go for, right?”

  “But there are huge crowds in the region. They’ll see it. One nuke they might miss, but two—Look, Kalic is the capital, and—”

  “I know all that.” Fain didn’t—Skallon was the Al-vean expert—but he wasn’t in the mood for a geography lesson. “Just can it, huh?”

  “But you’re running the risk—”

  ‘It’s done. Forget it.” Fain hated needless talk. He phased in a search routine for the senceivers, to bracket where the Changeling could land. They would have to take the Changeling on the ground and they would have to do it fast, before the thing could get away. A messy problem, sure. But he knew how to do it.

  2

  “Shifting eighty degrees clockwise,” Fain called. He stepped down heavily and his suit did the rest. He shot up thirty meters. His gyros kept him oriented to scan the area ahead and at the same time he was reading the deep scan senceivers, checking for phantom images or leakage from a power unit. The Alvean forest skimmed by below him. Vines and fronds masked the thickets, but he could make out a. few trails. Nobody moving on them. No feedback from the sensors.

  “Leapfrogging again,” Skallon yelled.

  “What? Christ, keep your voice down. I can hear you easy.” Skallon was getting excited. That was bad. If he got carried away with the power suit he would start making big, dumb mistakes.

  Fain watched Skallon shoot up out of the forest fifteen klicks away. The shiny suit was easy to pick out, even without the pulsing red overlay on the inside of Fain’s face plate. Skallon bounded up a hill, skipping lightly over rocky ledges. He skimmed over the top, just setting down once to revector eighty degrees. Then he fell down the other face in power glide and let the forest swallow him. Fain had to admit the kid could use the equipment. Using it smart was another thing.

  “Were picking up nothing,” Fain said. “Maybe the gridding was wrong. If it—”

  “No, it’s around here. The capsule must have its screens up, too, or we’d pick up something.”

  “Why assume we’re even close? I don’t—”

  “It fits with the Changeling profile. Look, we’ve got to shake him up.”

  “How?”

  “Watch.” Fain clicked his Y-rack onto automatic. He stamped down and the suit reinforced the motion, sending him arcing over a tall stand of vegetation. Animals scattered away in all directions; his acoustic amps picked up their frantic scurryings. At the top of his step the Y-rack emptied two slugs sideways. Then he was down in the comparative safety of the forest. He spent two seconds analyzing the new input from the sensors; nothing. Then the slugs hit. The dual crump sounded heavy in the still air.

  “What’s the idea?” Skallon shouted. “What was in that stuff?”

  “Medium HE.” Fain moved quickly around a ridge line, puffing.

  “Any specific target in mind?”

  “No. Get your screens up.” Fain bounded down into a gulley.

  “They’re up already. You don’t have to keep checking on me. What I want to know is, who said you could fire at random? You might hit some natives. And we’re on Alvea now, remember? What I say has some weight.”

  “You picking up anything?”

  “No, nothing. Look, we’re partners and before you do something like that again—”

  “Somebody has to draw fire. You want the job?”

  “No, frankly. And it didn’t work, anyway. You can t—

  A brilliant orange flash. A roar.

  Stones rattled on Fain’s armor. He hit the deck and a blistering yellow bolt spattered over the hillside above him.

  “Christ! You okay, Fain? Oh yeah, I can see your suit parameters are still norm. Where was that from?”

  “Shut up.” Fain lay face down in a patch of mud, studying the senceiver display rippling across his face plate. No need to move until all the score was in. The Changeling’s barrage had been shrewd, with just enough delay to let him move into better visibility—or at least, that was Fain’s best guess. But better visibility from where? He peered at the contour map. He called up probability distributions for the source of the barrage. They made twisted lines on the map of the hills. Blue, pink, red. Three red splotches were grouped in the same azimuthal section. Each splotch had a good line of sight toward him, if the Changeling was sighting through the narrow canyons he could trace on the contour map. He sent a squirt inquiry up to Mother. She answered in three seconds with a further analysis. He told her to weigh moderately the hypothesis that the Changeling would want to head for Kalic. The recalculated probabilities eliminated one of the high-probability red zones. Fain frowned. That was as much as he was going to get without doing something.

  “Skallon.”

  “Yes? Everything seems quiet. I—”

  “You got low-level grenades? Launch one at tree-top, max range.”

  “Read you. Here goes.”

  Fain’s tally board showed the launch: green Dopplers. Fain was up on his feet and on full power before the grenades had gone a hundred meters. He double-timed it down the gulley. A bunch of vines got in his way and he went through them, cutting with a slice beam. He tapped into Mother for two seconds and saw no situation change. He fired his Y-rack. The high explosives chugged out. Fain sprawled under an overhang and doubled up. The Changeling wouldn’t hesitate this time; no point. But Skallon’s grenades might complicate the problem enough to throw off its judgment.

  Rock ripped open fifty meters away. Fire boiled from the cliff face. Rocks clattered on his armored back. But that was it.

  “Skallon.”

  “He hit at both of us. Not close, though.”

  “I’m calling in Mother.”

  “Fine by me.”

  Fain squinted at the probability matrix that swam on his face plate. Only one red site left. That didn’t mean they had the Changeling pinned, but the estimated minimax was eighty-three percent. Good. Good enough, anyway.

  Fain called for a strike from Mother. He had time to sit up and tilt his cowling back. The tight electron beam came slicing down through the cloud-shrouded sky like a blue-white line scratched from heaven. It left a bright retinal image and then it was gone, a microsecond pulse. His IRs picked up the expanding
heated region for a full second afterward. The acoustic rumble followed seven seconds behind, as Fain skimmed over the ridgeline and ran full tilt for the target.

  Skallon appeared as a whistling blip on his port plate. The Y-rack went chug and chug and chug. Fain fanned the target area with a paralyzing beam on the top of his fifth stride. He had seven klicks visibility. Nothing was giving feedback for power or UV excess.

  In the IR—

  There it was. Heat spill.

  “I make it zero five eight by two seven,” Fain barked. “Seepage in IR. Passive to electromagnetic probes.” Skallon sent curt agreement. “Let’s hit it.”

  The H.E. from the two Y-racks was blowing big gouts in the forest around the target. Fain sized up his sweep area and saw nothing funny. He dug in and leaped over a hill, getting max shelter. The e-beam should have taken out the whole inboard defense system, but that was a techtalk theory. Fain wasn’t going to bet his neck on it.

  Fain checked his flanks. Skallon was five seconds behind and to the right. He bounded forward, cutting through trees and vines and crap in the way. Ahead a big chunk of dirt went up with a bang—the last of the H.E.

  The air was thick with dust; not a bad cover at all. Fain angled left. The vegetation suddenly parted. He was going better than a hundred klicks an hour and the capsule leaped up at him. He washed it in flame by reflex. Then he hit—there was no point in trying to avoid it. His armor clanged and a bulkhead crumbled. Fain stumbled into a wrecked control pod. The shiny metal and plastaform was blacked and browned by electrical fires. The e-beam had blown everything.

  Fain swiveled to the command couch, hand raised to attack.

  The couch was empty.

  As he backed out, Skallon crunched into the blasted clearing. Fain waved him to silence, gesturing at the couch. “Point is, how long has it been gone?”

  “Could be half hour, max.” Skallon was puffing.

  “We’ll have to search.”

  “Has it got a suit?”

  Fain checked the smouldering capsule. “No, there’s no harness for one.”

  “That fits with the inventory report for its ship.”