The legendary courtier Damocles is said to have reveled at a royal banquet, oblivious to the sword suspended above him by a single hair. Humanity, in celebrating its escape from the plot of hostile Krulirim, may be as recklessly unobservant as was Damocles. Like Damocles, extreme peril hangs, unnoticed, just over our heads and beyond our reach.
—excerpt from "The Continuing Danger
from Krulchukor Artifacts"
(Classified national-security briefing to the President)
The sword of Damocles was a later conceit. The comparison with which Kyle first vocalized his resurgent dread was less elegant, and far less flattering to his species.
Inch-thick salmon steaks, crusted with black pepper, sizzled on the grill. Mesquite smoke rose from a bed of perfect red-hot coals. Chirps and warbles filled the air. An ice dam collapsed in the chrome bucket in which a champagne bottle was chilling for the meal, the melting cubes settling with a lyrical tinkle into new positions.
If only things were as idyllic as they appeared.
"I like it." Britt's sweeping gaze encompassed the old fieldstone house, the rough-surfaced redbrick terrace framed in massive weathered timbers, the ranks of pine and mountain ash and dogwood in full flower that graced the nearby hillside. Kyle's other guests were at that moment hiking up that steep slope. "Very calming."
"Thanks, boss." Kyle expertly flipped the salmon as he tried to imagine a segue into what was bothering him. Darlene had succeeded, at his instigation, in drawing those other guests, the balance of the erstwhile crisis task force, from earshot. The more time he spent with her, the more glaring were his own rough edges. How would she—had she known—bring this up?
He needn't have worried.
"We've been colleagues how long?" Britt nibbled on a deviled egg. "This is my first time here. And, no offense, you're an every-silver-lining-has-a-cloud sort of guy . . . not to deny that your annoying pessimism all too often turns out to be annoying realism. In short, you're the last member of our merry band I'd expect to host a victory party. What is this really about?"
Still unsure how to begin, Kyle pondered the salmon sizzling on the grill. "It's like shooting fish in a barrel," he blurted. "And we're the fish." In plain English, that was the unnerving conclusion of weeks of confidential research.
Darlene, Erin Fitzhugh, and Ryan Bauer emerged into the clearing on the crest of nearby Krieger Ridge. From where they stood, the burned-out site of Swelk's arrival remained evident. All recognizable fragments of the lifeboat had long ago been taken to the Franklin Ridge lab. Good job, Dar: they'd be away long enough to cover the basics.
"Would you mind elucidating, Kyle?"
"The Krulchukor weapon platforms. They're orbiting over our heads, beyond our reach. They're quiescent, but we can't know what may set them off again." Now that the topic was broached, icy calm settled over him. He was as certain of this analysis as any work he'd ever done. "Ever ask Ryan about his fear of flying?"
"Care to pick up the pace? I imagine you arranged our friends' absence to speak alone with me. They'll surely be back for dinner soon."
Guilty as charged. "The masersats have been quiet since the destruction of the Consensus. We've taken that to mean the starship controlled them. No starship, no threat. But that was only inference. People at the lab have been poring over the records from that day. We can't interpret the radio signals from the Consensus, but there is no obvious time correlation between messages and maser blasts. We witnessed several smooth hand-offs of attack roles as Earth's rotation took some satellites out of line-of-sight of their targets. And we now know the masersats didn't all stop shooting at once." Kyle suppressed an irrelevant twinge of cognitive dissonance at calling the tactical transfers hand-offs. Krulirim did not exactly have hands.
"And this means?"
"It suggests that the satellites have autonomous capability. That worries me. And we can see from Swelk's translation program, and dealings with the F'thk robots, that Krulirim have better language-understanding software than humans. Natural language understanding is one of the largely unmet challenges of artificial-intelligence research. The observations all confirm Swelk's claims of widespread AI usage at home, technology far beyond anything we have."
A wind gust riffled Britt's hair as he thought. "Then why did the masersats stop firing? What would make them start again?"
"Now I'm drawing my own inferences. There might have been multiple causes for the halt. First, we were attacking the masersats as best we could. We probably damaged or destroyed a few. Meanwhile, and second, some masersats might just have hit all their preprogrammed targets. Before stopping, they'd already destroyed our and the Russians' experimental ground-based ABM/antisatellite laser facilities. They'd obliterated the International Space Station"—thankfully abandoned since shortly after the Atlantis disaster—"and far too many other satellites. They'd nailed dozens of ICBMs in flight, missiles we'd retasked as antisatellite weapons, then fried the silos those rockets launched from." Kyle scowled in remembrance of the casualties.
"Point three. The masersats are solar-powered. Even one microwave blast uses lots of stored energy. Infrared observations during the assault suggest some masersats were temporarily drained. They would have had to recharge before they could fire again.
"The Krulirim didn't expect our ambush. My hypothesis is that the masersats were in an automatic self-defense mode. Once they hit all preprogrammed targets"—like, presumably, the innocent, sitting duck of a space station—"and once we stopped providing targets of opportunity by firing at them, there was nothing obvious left to shoot at. Who knows what activity, what overheard radio chatter, AIs on the satellites might interpret, or misinterpret, as threatening? Who's to say under what circumstances they can self-designate new targets?"
Kyle rushed on. "And we still don't know the meaning of 'Clean Slate.' Or what the Krulirim did on the moon. We must go there, we have to."
Britt's beer stein shattered on the patio. Kyle stared. His boss never lost his temper.
"No." Widened eyes revealed Britt's self-amazement. "Kyle, there are limits."
"But we don't . . ."
"I said, no. Do you honestly believe Nate McDowell wants to retire right now? Do you understand what happens when a billion overseas consumers boycott American corn and fast food and computers and movies?"
Kyle's other guests crossed a glade halfway down the hill. Whatever he'd done wrong, he had to make amends. Quickly. He did a mental rewind. "A moon program isn't affordable?"
"Not politically. Not economically." Kneeling, Britt began to collect bits of glass. "I apologize for my outburst."
"It's all right." But it wasn't. How dire were circumstances? Take something when you can't have everything. The advice that popped into his head could have come from Britt's years of mentoring, or Dar's more recent influence. It wasn't his normal approach to problems.
"Britt, excuse me. Forget I mentioned the moon, and we'll get back to certainties. The aliens eavesdropped on us by satellite. Their software translated and interpreted what they overheard. And our most optimistic projections say we disabled fewer than half the masersats."
Erin, Ryan, and Darlene made known their imminent return in an outburst of laughter. Erin Fitzhugh roared the loudest, no doubt relishing her own raunchy joke. A grinning Ryan Bauer followed her from the woods, waggling the beer emptied during the brief hike. Darlene appeared last, looking sheepish.
"Enjoy your meals, folks." Britt straightened, a cupped hand holding a carefully arranged mound of glass shards. His confident manner belied his earlier, unwonted anger. "It looks like we have work yet ahead of us."
Darlene blushed at another peal of laughter, as Britt, Ryan, and Erin made their ways to their cars. She made a production of dumping paper plates and plastic utensils into the trash—it kept her back to the hall from which Kyle, having escorted the others, would reappear. As she dawdled, crunching gravel marked the departure of vehicles.
"Thanks again for the help." Kyle had stopped in the doorway. "For the side dishes and getting me time alone with Britt."
Damn that Erin Fitzhugh. Darlene began scraping serving bowls. "My pleasure."
"Leave those. That's above and beyond the call of duty. You've got a long drive, too."
She puttered a little longer at the sink, until she felt her face was no longer red. Frantic scratching at the patio door gave her a good excuse to turn. She'd brought the kittens for the day. "Mind if I let in Blackie?" Stripes was already ramming around inside.
"Sure." Pregnant pause. "On the back forty before dinner . . . why all the cackling?"
She was a trained diplomat, and she could surely spin, digress, or weasel her way out of any admission. But this wasn't work; maybe she'd play it straight. Wiping damp hands on her jeans, she swiveled to face him. "How shall I put this? Erin speculated somewhat colorfully about the . . . closeness . . . of our friendship."
"I can imagine how delicately she made the suggestion." Kyle grimaced. "If you don't mind my asking, Dar, what was your response?"
She hadn't dignified Fitzhugh's gibe with an answer. Darlene crouched to scratch Blackie between the ears. The kitten was a gangly teenager now. Swelk loved the cats—and she'd never see them grow up. Darlene fought back tears.
Life was too short to always play it safe. They kept skirting the edge of a deeper relationship, and then shying away. As Erin would have said, screw this. "I defended your virtue."
"Ouch! You sure know how to hurt a guy."
Saying nothing is an old ploy for making the other person say more. She said nothing for a long time. The moon peeked over the ridge, cool silver light streaming through the patio doors.
"And you said nothing I didn't deserve." He crossed the room and kissed her. "The moon is beautiful tonight. Let's sit outside for a while."