The Chaos Weapon Read Online Free PDF Page B

hands. One of our Chaos computers uses a reference baseline centered on this building. That baseline trace has just disappeared off the top of the graph. If our interpretations are correct, we’re just four minutes away from another catastrophe—right here. I suggest we evacuate the building fast.”
    “What are the portents you see in the sky?”
    “Vaster than storms, dark forces are building: blacker than absolute, redder than fire. Mammoth disaster, death, and destruction. Minds meshed in chaos
…
    …
the war has begun!”
    The space-shuttle
Spanier
coasted into Earth-orbit and prepared to shed its speed over three complete circuits of the globe. Course calculation was entirely automatic, so on the control deck the captain had little to do other than cast an occasional eye over the instrument registers and sip the green-eyed Venus-lime from a null-G bag. Upon cessation of the powered drive, the ship had been in a free-fall condition, and now the gentle action of the retro units began to bringa welcome sensation of low gravity back to the craft and its three hundred space-weary travelers.
    On completion of the first orbit, the instrument readings were true to specification, and the computers themselves opened up a communications channel and began to feed data to their destination port at Alaska Field. Then something went wrong. One of the onboard triplexed course computers began to disagree with the other two, and a fault was signaled right across the boards. The captain hastily evaluated the situation, decided that two computers in tandem could make the landing without his intervention, and switched out the manual controls which had been activated when the first computer had fallen out of accord. He reported the fault on the voice channel to Alaska Field and relaxed warily in his harness in case any further trouble showed up.
    It did. Halfway through the second orbit, the temperature sensors in the titanium hull indicated a reading climbing above the safety limit, then the integrating altimeter protested that their rate of descent was far too high. Cursing, the captain reached to take back control, but in the instant before his fingers contacted the switch, the errant electronics played their last and final joke. A massive burst of the retro units killed the ship’s momentum, subjecting the occupants of the shuttle to dangerously high G-forces. The shuttle nosed deeply into the stratosphere, and the airfoils were powerless to restore its flight path in the thin atmosphere. Like a stone, the shuttle dropped toward the Earth, then the stone quickly became white hot and coalesced into a ball, and the ball became a flaming mass. A strange tension in the continuum shaped its final trajectory so that the fireball hit Chaos-Center like the bursting of a bomb.
    From the center of the parkland where they had gathered, the group watched the missile fall. With a crash like rampant thunder, the building seemed momentarily to expand in all directions, then to collapse inward upon itself. Very few seconds after the strikethere was little left of the ChaosCenter main building but a pile of rubble overhung by a cloud of dust and smoke. Rising straight into the clear skies above, the vapor trail left by the descending missile stood like the shaft of a spear which had been plunged out of heaven.
    “What the hell was that?” Delfan asked, after a long silence.
    “Some sort of spacecraft, I think.” Saraya’s face was grave. “We’ll get a report on it later. We’ve lost nearly a third of our Chaos computing capacity there. But I wonder if the information we’ve gained wasn’t worth the exchange.”
    “What information?”
    “The fact that such an incredible incident happened exactly when and where it did. In Chaos work, we frequently start with a resultant and scan back to locate the cause. I suspect our unknown enemy has run through a similar exercise—looked at some future event which gave him reason for concern, then