TRIPLE POINT

Chapter 2

Janiver 31, 2036 C.E.

	"There is one good thing about having a war on your own borders," is what I am saying as we pull into the outskirts of Semiozod-Alta, fifty kilometres beyond our own lines. "And that is, you do not have so far to go home on leave."
	Natya gives me a dirty look, her ears lowered. I see the big mare's back hoof start to twitch, and remember why she is such a bad poker player. As well as a sore loser.
	"As long as we're out of the Zone, that's all that matters," Vaclav puts in mildly. He is munching on some sort of grain bar, a flapjack concoction with oats and sunflower seeds by the smell, and he sticks his head out of the window. "Almost there !"
	It is more than about time for a rest. After a month of living in the forest, the five of us are all that remains of our unit, and we have been pulled out to get some rest while they fix our suits. The coach has an open roof-hatch: as I rear up on my hind legs to look out at the scenery (the familiar frozen lakes and snowy pine forests), my left back leg gives a painful twinge.
	"You sure you shouldn't be in hospital ?" Vaclav asks, spotting me wincing as I drop down to all four walking legs "they pulled enough metal out of you to make a bayonet, they say."
	"Probably they did, too." Natya comments. "Waste not, want not." As we know, all metal is valuable these days: the mountains of ore and untouched seams are long gone. Instead of bonanzas like the finding of Magnetogorsk's Iron Mountain, the real discoveries are made in the laboratories - we centaurs are not the only engineered life-forms that preserve the independence of the Greater Liechtenstein Empire. Just a few kilometres behind the border, we saw today the fresh scars of a re-mined area, with the huge bubbling vats.
	We have bacteria that can seize traces of heavy metals from old rubbish tips, contaminated soils, or whatever; feed them with wood pulp and refine the living foam like into the ores of a dozen metals this land needs. Wood-pulp and polluted industrial sites (courtesy of the previous Russian red Empire) are things we are not short of.
	Suddenly the coach turns into a swept square, the steam-brakes squealing as we pull to a halt. (Did I mention how short of oil we are ?) "Semiozod-Alta, all off," the driver calls back, and steps down the steam pressure. The high-pressure combustion chamber happens to burn birchwood, and the steam turns efficient turbines; quiet, no scent to speak of. All we do here, we try and turn to advantage; wood ash feeds the crops, blood makes the grass grow.
	Vaclav suddenly starts, his deer ancestry showing more than ever as he catches a sight of something. Then his slow smile comes, as he turns to Natya, who is busy shepherding the half-wolves off the bus. The big centaur mare is in a volatile mood, and a bad one - Vaclav looks like he has found the way to cure both those tendencies.
	"Here's someone you didn't think you'd see again," he nudges her on the upper-body ribs, a safe thing now her armour is off and in the repair shops. She turns, nostrils flared and teeth ready to snap at him - and then her expression softens. Her tail raises unconsciously, and anyone without even a nose can suddenly see why she is in such a mercurial mood, this time of year. 
	"'Tis the season of great joy," I find s snatch of an old song coming to my own lips. But she is already out of the coach and cantering, sending passers-by running for cover as she makes a bee-line for her suddenly re-acquired target.
	"Now, when someone is taken off by Intelligence like HE was, you don't expect to see them walking around the Front again," Vaclav comments, swinging his saddlebags over, and nudging Torm and Eric, the less sapient Half wolves out of the coach and onto the clean cobbles of the square. 
	I nod towards where a tonne of excited mare is picking up and hugging a green-overalled mouse with more affection than concern for his ribs. "I wonder what the Englishman's doing back here, of all places "
	

	An hour later, we are demonstrating that even our land has a few facilities to be proud of. Steam fills the air like a warmer cousin of the snow-mist we have got so used to - except it is far more comfortable, with the heated pool and showers.
	We are all floating, in water deep enough for even centaur bodies to relax in. There is a metre of insulation around the building; reprocessed plastics from the old dump sites. 
	Natya looks like a space station attended by a tiny shuttle nearby, as the mouse grooms her skilfully with one of the bath house's floating brushes. It is only now that we register that the Englishman is called Grimsley; of course, he had told it to us the hour we had spotted him trying to bury his parachute. 
	I float back in the water, and think about it. Before, he was a cargo, something to be dropped off, and no real concern of ours. But now, he has been through the mill of our Intelligence service, and he is re-joining us within tactical missile range of the frontier. This should be a tale to hear, I tell myself.
	But now, as Grimsley runs his pink fingers through the mare's winter coat, the furless palms looking oddly naked, he starts to talk without prompting.
	"Tha's wonderin' what I'm doin' back 'ere, like," he sounds apologetic. "Fact is - folk asked for me services, an' I didn't have the nerve to say no. So I'm seconded to you, same as tha' tek's them parties of Jap tourists snipin'. 'Cept they pays you, and I'm gerrin' same wages you are."
	Vaclav stares hard at him. "Don't your Air Force want you back ?" He demands "Last time I heard, your Royal Air Force was short of pilots, since it got re-nationalised."
	Grimsley waves an apologetic hand. "I never SAID who I were workin' for, did I ? Tha' looked at me uniform - saw it hadn't any markin's on it, and guessed by me accent."
	"True, true ..." Natya murmurs. Her nostrils are flared widely, as she surveys him in a whole new light. "So, who paid your fuel bills ?" She does not state the obvious: if it had been a S.U.N. or Russian mission, he would not be here in such comfortable surroundings. 
	"Tha's heard of STALT, independent firm ? If you can call it a firm - it's half a country, an' half a corporation. I fly - 'scuse, I DID fly fer them. Tha' knows the name, I see."
	I give a harsh bark. "I know them." When the old Eastern Bloc had so suddenly collapsed, part of the problem was that they had concentrated so many of their finest brains into their Intelligence services, not least because it was cheaper to have them on your side rather than have to worry about what they might be getting up to. "Bulgarian Secret Police, had a Management Buy-out, recruited wherever it could find - and it had its pick of unemployed spies, easy rates and loyalty assured. "Will spy for food" job. That's not so bad - but they never came home when we got the Empire going. We NEEDED them."
	The big mouse ears drooped, and Grimsley looked embarrassed. "They folk's all old by now, the founders. Nobbut fresh recruits doin' fieldwork now - all above board, we flies for anyone. An' if we gets shot down, nobody goes ta war about it."
	"But I imagine your employers aren't too happy if you get caught, eh ?" Vaclav nods. "So you're at a loose end - or would that be, a noose's end if they catch you ?"
	"Sometimes tha' teks the jobs tha' can get," Grimsley's voice has a snap now; we see the sharp rodent chisel-teeth glitter. But then he relaxes, and we hear a tale indeed.

	Blue-white shone the sun in a sky of violet and purple, ninety-five percent of the atmosphere already below as the altimeter read sixty-thousand feet and still climbing.
	Grimsley's orders were clear: takeoff from the rented base hewn out of the permafrost of the Greenland Anarchist Non-State, link up with the tanker over Scotland, and climb steadily up over the North Sea, Denmark and the Baltic, to within sight of the newly restored port of Danzig. Well, he'd done that: in the wing tanks of the replica aircraft was a full load of liquid hydrogen, no longer attracting ice in this upper air. Now, the fun started.
	The replica Bristol 188 was a pirate copy, derived from the stolen computer construction templates calculated from some strange place in Japan - they'd done the hard work, STALT had merely hacked the files and sent them to a small North Korean hard-currency-only workshop, to have the stainless steel airframe and barely transistorised electronics reproduced.
	"Check engine spool revs, check jetpipe temperatures ... " with the ease of long practice, he summed up the information on the dozens of mechanical instruments. On a modern aircraft - hell, on any aircraft half a century old - there would have been a computer to do this job. But, as mice knew instinctively, there are ways of using your very weakness as strengths.
	"Cameras, ready to roll. Afterburner - Engage !" He squeezed the mechanical lever (no nervelink cyber HERE !) and felt the airframe shake as liquid power slammed through the huge Rolls-Royce pure turbojet engines, the hydrogen cooling their crude turbines permitting twice the power of the originals. Nose five degrees positive, the Bristol hurtled towards the Baltic States at Mach Two, still accelerating. One pass over the Triple Point was all it needed: one zoom-climb roll and reverse back the way he entered, diving at maximum speed past the alerted defences.

	"Hold it ! Vaclav protests. "NOBODY can do that any more - your aircraft might have been built for the 1950's, but our defences weren't. We'd see you before you got into the Baltic - there'd be satellites watching you roll out of Greenland, even."
	"Aye, tha's reet, s'far as it goes," the mouse taps one side of his muzzle with a sly and dextrous finger. "But - I don't know if it goes reet good in VolksDeutsch, but we've a sayin' at home, "There's none so blind as them who WON'T see." An' I'm here - I got this far, eh ?"
	Vaclav quietens down. Some things you can't argue with.

	As Grimsley powered across the stratosphere in a polished, angular steel aircraft at approaching Mach Three, there must have been hundreds of radars able to see him. But for each radar, there was at least one, and probably a whole command structure, of highly priced signal processing and tactical computers. They were built to spot the stealthiest aircraft ever built; even the wholly carbon-fibre Tupolev Helios, the most dreaded dogfighting dirigibles in the skies. Moreover, they cheerfully expected to tackle jammers at least as smart and expensive as themselves - direly Machiavellian devices which could make an untutored display show anything from a flock of birds to the sky-written complete score of Beethoven's Ninth.
	It was simple, and built into the basic premises that nobody had questioned in generations. NOBODY can REALLY be doing what Grimsley was doing - they simply didn't believe a byte of it.

	High above the Triple Point, cameras whirred. At this point, the pilot was concentrating wholly on the primitive instruments: the slightly updated cavity magnetron radar painted an adequate picture of the landscape below, and did so on a wavelength that nobody down there still alive had experience with using. 
	"Fuel reserves, sixty-three percent, throttling back for zoom turn ...." hands pulling the stick back, the throttles going almost to idle as the nose came up, the looping turn that would trade speed for altitude and flick him back. The pressure faded, and for long seconds the ballistic course took him right over the nominal centre of the Point, the landscape now below his ears as the Bristol came inverted.
	Suddenly, there was a screech from one of the Detectors. Something was heading his way - but with twenty vertical miles to travel, he had time to react.
	"Is it missile, or radar, or ... 'Ey, 'Ek, What's THAT ?" Mouse whiskers bent as they tried to stiffen beneath the pressure-suit's visor, at the sight of just what system was warning of attack.
	Riveted on the side of the canopy, was a grey box which Grimsley knew contained a totally sealed unit, and an extravagantly large demolition charge. No wires went into it: he recalled how it had been installed by tight-lipped hacker-priests of Greenland. "If anything ever triggers this off - say your prayers," was all he had been told. "It'll signal us that something damnable has happened to the mission - and I mean that in the most exact sense."
	Grimsley snapped the nose round, scanning the instruments for the telltale flare of a fast-sprinting interceptor below, or the precision laser that would illuminate him for a charged-particle knockout punch. Pure lasers, he had a chance against at this range in a polished steel aircraft - it was built to glow red-hot at the wingtips anyway .....
	Just then, he felt a crushing sensation build within his head - slapping the autopilot on, he howled in agony as it built until he felt his brain would crawl out of his ears. Then .... something did indeed burst.
	It was a soundless fury, a swelling fractal-tentacled ball of energy above and off to starboard - the pressure released in his mind, just in time to see the energy field slash out like a swirling jellyfish. Polychrome lines weaved past him, missing by scant metres - and then it was gone.
	So had most of the instrument readings. Only the ancient mechanical dials still worked; everything electronic, was dead.
	"What was that .. eyup, ere's more of it," his chisel-teeth were bared as he spotted drifting filaments in the air. One flashed across his vision, coming from behind - there was something strange about its trajectory. It must have gone right .....
	With a growing horror, he looked back at the port wing. Something had come right through - but there was no hole. Instead, a rainbow glow like a cheerful disease had taken root, and was slowly spreading. Where it passed, the wing was no longer steel - it was something - different.
	When it began to spread towards the engine and throw off fractal tentacles of its own, Grimsley decided that it was time to see how well the survival capsule REALLY worked when put to the test.


	The hot water laps around us in the bath, as we think. The only sound is Torm and Eric engaging in a mock battle: the half-wolves have a short attention span, and quickly tire of floating in still water.
	"Aye, an' I took a few good piccies with me, an' all," Grimsley nods seriously. "Tha' knows, I've to give t'computer access codes, or it gets scrambled for good ? I gave your lot everythin' I'd taken - an' all the pictures. They seemed grateful, like."
	"Hiding an aircraft in clear air ... inverse Stealth ..." Vaclav says dreamily. "Of course, you wouldn't get away with it for long - someone'd bring a few very old and very insistent radars out of the museums, and make sure the computers didn't have a say in the matter ..."
	Natya snorts. "So, what WAS it, they say, brought you down ?"
	There is a sharp intake of mouse breath. And then, in a voice so soft some species would not hear it, we hear those unwelcome words. "It were a Psychotronic Bomb."
	The atmosphere seems to freeze: even Torm and Eric whimper with the emotional wave that sweeps through us. Nobody uses Psychotronics these days - the consequences are rather worse than the dirtiest nuke imaginable. But the Brussels EC used them, in their subjugation of Europe: for twenty years the legomancers beneath Brussels held the old West in slavery.
	"Those things ... cost," Natya says slowly. "They open up spacetime .. they let - things - in."
	Grimsley nods. "Your Intelligence folk said as much. An' I'm your guide, like - I've got t'data. Somewhere in the Triple point, there's someone as didn't ought to be."
	Vaclav's ears twist wryly. He speaks Volksdeutsch best of us: the common language we all speak aside from our national tongues. "You mean, "Didn't ought to be around here," he suggests mildly. "Otherwise, you mean it shouldn't exist, in an absolute sense."
	Mouse ears dip in worry. "Aye, Tha' got it reet, first time."