The Apocalypse Troll

  It was obvious when she was sated, for her eyelids dropped abruptly and the soup lost all attraction for her. It happened so suddenly it caught him with a spoonful halfway to her mouth, and when he offered it to her she might have died between bites for all the interest she showed. For just a moment, he was afraid she had died—that the soup had proved some sort of deadly poison—but her slow, even breathing and the faint blush of color returning to her porcelain cheeks reassured him.

  He sat back and shook his head in slow bemusement. She was more muscular than most women he'd encountered, but she was no more than five feet four, so how could she pack it away like that? He eyed the half-emptied kettle on the stove. She'd eaten over a gallon of soup, and he couldn't begin to imagine where she'd put it all. But he was rapidly coming to the conclusion that the only eventuality which should really worry him would be the discovery that he actually understood anything that was going on.

  He sat there for half an hour, listening to her breathe and wondering if she was going to come around, but she never even moved. She was motionless but for the slow rise and fall of her breasts and an occasional very faint flutter of her eyelids, and he felt his own eyes growing heavy.

  He glanced out a porthole and grinned tiredly. No wonder he felt weary. The sun was rising, and he'd been up all night, witnessed an impossible dogfight conducted with nukes and what had to be some sort of energy weapons, survived a multimegaton blast at entirely too close a range for comfort, and rescued a critically wounded and all too human-looking alien from certain death by drowning.

  He rose and stretched, then checked his barometer carefully. It had risen very slightly since his last check, so maybe the good weather was going to hold. God knew he could use a spell of easy sailing if he had to play Florence Nightingale to Dejah Thoris for the foreseeable future!

  He looked back down at his unexpected passenger. She didn't look very menacing, but perhaps it would be a good idea to nap topside in the cockpit, just in case.

  He did, and if he was a bit shamefaced about hanging onto his .45 when he did, he didn't let it stop him from taking it along.

  The next four days were among the most exhausting Dick Aston could remember. The girl did nothing but eat and sleep; she never even showed an inclination to rouse for a trip to the head, and that did almost more to convince him of her inhuman pedigree than anything else about her.

  The only thing with the power to rouse her was hunger. Even that didn't bring her back to awareness, but she grew sufficiently agitated in her slumber to wake him less than three hours after he first fed her.

  Too many years of a hazardous lifestyle had made him a very light sleeper, but the sounds drifting up the open companion hatch had been almost frightening. There was an eerie note to them—a keening sound of distress he couldn't immediately understand. He shoved himself up and hurried down to her, rubbing sleep from his eyes and trying frantically to understand what had brought her to a whimpering, twisting parody of liveliness.

  He offered her water, and she drank greedily, but her agitation scarcely eased. It seemed inconceivable that hunger could possibly explain such obvious distress after she'd devoured so much soup, but nothing else suggested itself, and finally, in desperation, he opened a can of stew.

  Her frantic, twisting whimpers redoubled the instant she smelled it, and he found himself back beside the bunk without even heating it, spooning cold, glutinous stew into his voracious patient. She ate even more fiercely than before, and it took four family-sized cans of the stuff to satisfy her before she slumped back, as instantaneously limp as the last time.

  He stared at her in awe, glancing back and forth between her innocent, sleeping face and the empty cans. Lordy! She didn't look like she had a black hole concealed somewhere about her person. He only hoped he had enough food to complete the crossing!

  The pattern was established. She never woke, but she roused once every two and a half hours—or, to be more precise, once every one hundred forty minutes almost to the second by his watch—demanding to be fed. It was hard to believe even when he saw it happening, but her voracity never flagged, and his supplies dwindled rapidly under its ruinous onslaught. By the third day, he was genuinely concerned that he would run short, despite the fact that he was well ahead of his originally projected progress.

  He started spending more time with the huge spinnaker set, driving Amanda far harder—while he was awake, anyway—than he'd planned. A less curious man might have come to hate the demands his passenger placed on his own store of energy, but in Richard Aston's case, fascination overpowered all other emotions where she was concerned. By the middle of the second day, the wounds which should have killed her were faint, raised scars, and he half-suspected even those would vanish with time. All in all, she was a puzzle wrapped in a mystery, and his most driving desire was for her to wake up and talk to him.

  Commander Mordecai Morris, who rejoiced in the nickname "M&M" among his ruder intimates, was not a happy man. He knew perfectly well that he wasn't alone in that; indeed, he found himself uncomfortably well-placed to observe and appreciate the unhappiness of others.

  He sighed and stubbed out his forbidden cigarette (US military bases were officially smoking-free), then rubbed his weary eyes and wondered how many he'd smoked in the four days since it all hit the fan. Why did he even try to pretend he wasn't a nicotine addict, anyway? He managed to convince himself he was quitting—or cutting back, at least—for weeks on end, but only until the next crisis put him back into the pressure cooker. He suspected it stemmed from his ingrained dislike for admitting that he didn't really want to stop doing something he ought to stop.

  He fumbled for another cigarette, but the pack was empty. He peered down into it for a moment, then crushed it and dropped it into the shredder bag under his desk.

  "Well, Mordecai?" The voice from the door pulled his head around, and he summoned up a tired grin.

  "Hi, Jayne," he said, gesturing at a chair, and Lieutenant Commander Jayne Hastings walked into the cluttered office, waving a hand ineffectually against the blue canopy of stale tobacco smoke. The office felt close and muggy for an April night, even in Norfolk, Virginia.

  "I see the air-conditioning's still out," she observed, and Morris shrugged. She shook her head and sat, glancing at the full ashtray and clutter of empty coffee cups. "How long since you had a shower and a shave, Mordecai?" she asked gently.

  "Shower? Shave?" He rubbed his nose and grinned. "What're they?"

  "Twit," she said affectionately, and he made a face at her.

  Morris was a small, dark man with an artificial right foot and eyes which were warm and brown when not ringed with red—the sort of man dogs and children loved on sight. He was also a highly respected intelligence analyst, as was to be expected of the man Commander-in-Chief Atlantic Fleet had chosen as his chief intelligence officer. At the moment, he was unshaven and red-eyed, his uniform wilted, but on his best day, no one would ever confuse him with the steely-eyed image of the professional intelligence operative. That was perfectly all right with him—a dozen people in various Federal prisons had judged by appearances. Several one-time terrorists in a Middle Eastern cemetery had also discovered how sadly deceived they'd been in the unassuming, cheerfully corruptible naval attaché. Their effort to correct their error in judgment had been impressive, however, and although it had fallen short of their intention, it had been enough to cost him a foot and put him behind a desk.

  Jayne Hastings was a foot taller than her boss, with wheat-blond hair and bright green eyes. She styled her hair severely and hid her trenchant intelligence behind ridiculously large, round-lensed glasses, but her grooming was immaculate. It was one of the wonders of Morris's untidy life that she could spend just as many hours as he did on some critical project with never a misplaced crease or a hair out of place. It was unnatural.

  Morris's expertise was people—he was downright brilliant at evaluating trends and intentions—and Hastings was the technician of the te
am, with four degrees and an impressive background in air-breathing and satellite reconnaissance, both photographic and electronic. They were an unusually effective team under normal circumstances, but at the moment they had no more to work with than anyone else in the world's intelligence services.

  Everyone knew something had happened, but only the Americans and the Russians (and possibly the Chinese) had any idea what—and they were none too certain. At least all the major players seemed to have gotten enough advance warning from their space surveillance systems to know something was going on before all hell broke loose over the Atlantic. Fortunately. Morris shuddered to think what might have happened if they hadn't known. There'd been more than enough panic and suspicion as it was.

  "Listen, M&M, you may've managed to inveigle me down here at—" Hastings glanced at the twenty-four hour clock "—three a.m. by finally getting your hands on that video, but the only way you're getting any work out of me is if I get a promise out of you, first."

  "I wasn't aware this had become a union shop," Morris said mildly, and she snorted. "All right, Commander, what might that promise be?"

  "That you'll get some sleep when we're done," she said, suddenly more serious. "You look like hell. Go home. Take a shower and get some sleep before you stroke out on me."

  "I'd love to," he acknowledged her point with a sigh. "But I'm supposed to have a written brief for CINCLANT by oh-nine-hundred, and—"

  "I'll assemble the brief," she interrupted firmly. "God knows I've written enough for you before! You go home and get at least a couple of hours of sleep before you present it—he'll probably have you shot if you turn up looking like this. Remember what he said last time?"

  "You may have a point, Commander Hastings."

  "I do have a point, Commander Morris."

  "All right," he capitulated, "it's a deal." He grinned again and waved at the large-screen TV and VCR parked in the corner. "This one's going to be more your area than mine anyway."

  "That's the video?" she asked, her eyes sharpening with interest as she stood quickly and picked up a plastic video cassette.

  "Yup." Morris pushed back his own chair and watched her slip the tape into the VCR. "We're damned lucky to have it, too. That fighter jock was a long way from the big blast, so he didn't lose all his avionics, but a lot of his systems were fried, and he couldn't trust Roosevelt's electronics, either. It took a hell of a driver to put that bird onto a carrier by hand and eye. Matter of fact, I didn't know it could be done—and neither did Northrop-Grumman." He gave a brief snort of humor. "I understand the other aircrew were more than content to use their water wings, but not this guy. He and his RIO are the ones that nailed those first two missiles, too; they must have great, big brass ones. Anyway—" he shrugged "—here it finally is. I've got expert analyses out the ying-yang, and I've watched the damned thing a dozen times myself. Now it's your turn."

  "What was all the delay about?" she demanded.

  "CIA got their hands on it first, somehow," Morris snorted. "You know how compartmented they are over there. It's taken this long for them to find it and break it loose. The boss," he added dryly, "was not amused."

  "Why am I not surprised?" Hastings murmured, and they grinned at each other. Admiral Anson McLain, Commander in Chief Atlantic Fleet, was not a good man to cross. Especially not by sitting on intelligence, collected by one of his pilots, which concerned the death and/or injury of over a thousand of his sailors and the loss of one of his ships.

  "I think we can safely count on him to collect a few scalps," Morris agreed, then pointed at the TV. "Switch it on and take a look."

  Hastings nodded and punched the play button on the remote. The unit clicked and whirred to itself for a moment, then a night sky replaced the quietly hissing snow on the TV screen. A small digital readout in the lower right corner gave the date and time at which the tape had been made and another in the left corner gave a distance-to-target reading; at the moment, it was whirring downward with disconcerting speed. The picture was black and white but almost painfully sharp.

  "This from the new TCS?" Hastings asked absently.

  "Yup," Morris said again. "Does a nice job, doesn't it?"

  "I'll say. The old TISEO system and the first-generation TCS both looked good, but this is even better."

  Morris simply nodded. The latest tactical camera system fitted under the nose of late marks of the F-14D used a whole new optics system, not to mention a long overdue infrared sensor. The Tomcat had never been designed to be a stealthy platform, but at least it finally had a reasonably effective passive search system which didn't require its massive radar to broadcast its presence to all and sundry. It was a useful retrofit to the aging fighter, and the Tomcat crews claimed their new imagery was so sharp they could count an OpFor pilot's warts at fifty miles, which was an exaggeration . . . he thought.

  He leaned back and fought the weight of his eyelids, watching Hastings bend towards the television and wondering how she would react.

  There! He saw her flinch at the speed with which the brilliant streaks of light came sweeping towards her, but she mastered her reaction instantly and leaned still closer, eyes intent. Six light sources swelled with freight-train speed, bobbing and weaving as they came. It was impossible to make out much detail, but the lights kept getting bigger and bigger. After a moment, it became clear they were well above the camera—and that the Tomcat pilot was maneuvering hard to keep them in view. They swept over the aircraft, and the pilot put the big fighter into a climbing loop. Stars swooped wildly in their field of view, and then the lights reappeared, moving away. The image trembled and rotated dizzyingly for just a moment as the pilot rolled his aircraft, then smoothed back out.

  The lights continued to move away, but more slowly, and now the imagery showed at least some details of the craft which produced them. There were six of them, and four—all of which appeared identical—held a tight formation around a fifth, much larger shape while the sixth pursued them all. It was apparent now that the intense brilliance came not from the craft themselves but from a bowl-shaped curve of fire just ahead of each of them.

  The shapes were in sight for no more than three or four minutes when an intolerable glare from ahead and below burned out the images entirely. Crazy patterns of interference flashed and danced for a moment, and then the screen went blank.

  Lieutenant Commander Hastings was silent as she rewound the tape and played it again. Then she played it a third time, using the remote to freeze the picture repeatedly as she studied it. Finally she sighed and rewound the tape a final time, turning to Morris with a frown.

  "Those things were big," she said softly.

  "You might say that," he agreed. "The photo analysis people say most of the lead group were bigger than Spruance-class destroyers—and the biggie was the size of a CGN. The one in back was smaller, but not by a heck of a lot. They make it about—" he consulted a scratch pad "—three hundred to three hundred thirty feet, give or take."

  "Oh, how I wish we'd had a camera bird up there to watch all this!"

  "I understand the pulse from that big boom didn't do the Russkies' RORSAT a bit of good," Morris chuckled.

  "Not too surprising. But at least they had one, so they knew it wasn't us shooting at them, thank God!"

  "Amen," Morris said seriously. "I just wish we knew whether or not the PRC had satellite imagery of its own."

  "You and me both," Hastings agreed with a humorless grin. "We know they've got at least some recon birds hidden up there amongst all those 'commercial communications' birds of theirs. I have to agree with CIA and NSA that their main interest these days is Taiwan and that they're probably concentrating on the Pacific, not the Atlantic, but it would be nice to know. And the French—!"

  She tossed both hands upwards with a grimace, and Morris nodded. As was not, unfortunately, uncommon in American diplomatic history, the US had overplayed the "China Card" badly. Unlike the defunct Soviet Union, the Chinese Communist Party was showing
no particular signs of vanishing into the ash heap of history. Not that it showed any particular sign of remaining unswervingly attached to the principles of Marxism-Leninism, either. But any country with that many people and resources and an authoritarian government—whatever that government's ideology might be—was almost bound to attempt to expand its hegemony, and the Chinese had made it increasingly plain that Asia belonged to them. And that they were willing to threaten and even (probably) use military means to enforce that claim. As one consequence of that attitude, things were heating up over the Republic of Taiwan once more. That was why a two-carrier American task group had been deployed to the area, and it had become painfully clear that the US aerospace industry's efforts to improve the PRC's satellite launch capability had transferred rather more technology to the mainland Chinese in the last several years than anyone had realized at the time.

  As for the French, their fundamental anti-Americanism had only grown more pronounced as the much anticipated European Union continued to stagger along as a concept rather than a reality. The EU's persistent failure to solve the smouldering issues of the Balkans or defuse the growing nationalist tensions between Russia and certain other of the old soviet empire's fragments hadn't helped much, either. France, in particular, had been savage in the derision it heaped upon America's bumbling efforts in the Balkans, and the French government had become even more anti-US as its own failure to solve the same problems drove it into an ever more defensive attitude. Mordecai knew Paris had had at least one recon satellite in position to watch what had happened, but it had also been much closer to the largest of the nuclear explosions. What it had seen—or transmitted back home, at least—before the blast reduced it to so much expensive junk was anyone's guess . . . and the French weren't telling.