Wheelers

by Ian Stewart

  What was Halfholder up to? Pity he didn't dare involve her in anything important, but anyone who'd been that close to the EJs was tainted. Yes, sure, Lifesoul Cherisher and whatnot, but the driving force here was politics. Readiness was only part of the problem: motivating his troops was a far weightier issue. And then, out of the indigo, along came the EJs. Poisonbluvian saviors, innocent as the driven methane crystals, juveniles-in-the-fibroblast. . . Dupes. It didn't matter a qqqq whether the extrajovian world survived intact or turned to interstellar gravel. What mattered was that his fellow cultists thought it mattered. It was the spur he had been seeking for a megaday, and the motivation it had generated would compensate for another megaday of omitted preparation.

  Cherisher! This time we're going to win!

  It was a pity his forces had not yet been able to zoom in on the main goal, control of the Diversion Engines. Subtlety, that was the key. Move too soon in the direction of your true objective, and you give away too many secrets to the enemy. The Elders were slow, hidebound by tradition . . . but they were not stupid. They were so accustomed to power that they didn't need to move quickly, or even think quickly. Nevertheless, you couldn't rise to such a position without intelligence. Push an Elder too far, and you'd suddenly find what it took to reach that status.

  The fogscreen was working. The beauty of the situation was: it wasn't a fogscreen. Dominion over all Secondhome! An end to Elder oppression! That was a goal worth fighting for in its own right. The Diversion Engines were— xxxx! —a diversion. An excuse. Motivation, not consummation.

  All this must be concealed from Halfholder, who was far too literal a believer. He felt no shame. She would be adequately rewarded, whatever the outcome. If she survived.

  Death had come to Jupiter in the form of a twenty-trillion-ton snowball. Jaramarana had entered the Jovian system, coming closer than the orbital distance of Sinope and its three companions. Within twelve more days it would shave the surfaces of Ganymede and Europa, to depart ten times as quickly as it had arrived.

  On Earth, shadowy figures high up in military intelligence came to a decision. Over a secure nodelink they informed the undersecretary for world affairs that they were taking charge of the Jovian Task Force. Henceforth Uhlirach-Bengtsen would be no more than a mouthpiece. Charles Dunsmoore had been underperforming for a while, and then there had been the bizarre nonresignation broadcast—in public—but now he had taken leave of his senses completely.

  Uhlirach-Bengtsen had always known that the mission might come to this, but he had been confident of Charles Dunsmoore's abilities. Not anymore. The developments transmitted to him over the last few hours had changed all that, and the undersecretary was furious. Charles had lost his grip just when one final push would have seen the mission through to a successful conclusion. Instead of relying on tried and tested techniques of diplomacy, the idiot had sided with a bunch of alien revolutionaries. The shadow men were right: Dunsmoore had to be stopped. Uhlirach-Bengtsen had pleaded with the man, shouted at him, threatened him—but Charles had been implacable. "Peter, you're not out here where the action is. I know what I'm doing. Trust me."

  No way.

  At Europa Base, events were taking a new turn. The operating system of Wally Halberstam's node had some unusual features, of which the most important was a covert link to his security controllers back on Earth. To Dunsmoore, Halberstam was just another member of the scientific team, and a bit of a buffoon at that. Now, Charles was about to get a rude awakening.

  Halberstam had been preparing for this moment for his whole life, and now his long training and tedious years undercover would bear fruit. It was Dunsmoores own fault. If he hadn't argued so persuasively that there should be no military personnel on the Skylark, then Uhlirach-Bengtsen would not have been forced to concede most of Charles's objections, and then it would have been possible to maintain an overt military presence. Nice and open, aboveboard, everyone knowing where they stood. And if it had become necessary to remove Dunsmoore under those circumstances, the procedures for doing so would also have been open and aboveboard. It was Dunsmoore who had made a clandestine security presence essential, by insisting that no military personnel would be permitted on Skylark. Uhlirach-Bengtsen had been forced to agree to that, once the Belters had sided with Dunsmoore, but his agreement had been for public consumption only. He met with the shadow men and covert contingency plans were set in train.

  Wallace Halberstam had been recruited into Ecotopian Intelligence while he was still in college, doing a doctorate on systematic errors in neo-Darwinist philosophy. From that moment, his records on the Xnet had begun to deviate in certain respects from his actual career track. He had undergone extensive training during periods when his colleagues thought he was on vacation snorkeling in the Caribbean or doing some jet-snowboarding in the playgrounds of the Carpathian Mountains. He had enjoyed a highly successful scientific career, becoming a leading mechanical engineer in the fields of automated design and instant bespoke manufacture. He was also well versed in electronic counterinsurgency measures, hostage negotiations, and unarmed combat, but those did not figure on his vita.

  Finally, after all these years, the sleeper had been awakened, along with his unsuspected skills. Halberstam was the Earth authorities' safety net. With the comet breathing down their necks, Dunsmoore had called a halt to his discussions with the legitimate Jovian leadership—-just when they were about to bear fruit, for God's sake!—and had embarked upon a wild gamble. That crazy Odingo woman and her sister's weird brat had persuaded Dunsmoore to throw in his lot with a bunch of Jovian lunatics, their version of the greenies, who were fomenting revolution. Halberstam knew every word in Dunsmoore's dossier— he was well aware that Charles had had a thing going for Prudence Odingo, long ago . . . and he knew that feelings long repressed could easily surface under stress. The woman had evidently turned Charles's head—probably seduced the silly bugger—and filled it with anti-authoritarian trash. So now Moses Odingo's cute little alien playmate was flavor of the month, and the Elders, the legitimate authorities on Jupiter, were being undermined! Assassinated! This was no way to advance interplanetary relations, and it could have only one outcome.

  There was still time. The Elders could be persuaded to see sense. Essentially what they were facing here was a hostage situation, with the people of Earth playing the role of hostage. Dunsmoore was incompetent; he thought it was a diplomatic problem. A properly trained specialist in hostage negotiations like Halberstam would have made far quicker progress. The chance was still there, if only someone would seize it.

  Earth was too distant to make decisions in real time. Earth was worried sick, desperate, clutching at straws. Earth had lost all confidence in Dunsmoore, but it didn't want to tip the man over the edge. So Halberstam was ordered to use his initiative. He was the man on the spot: he must make the decisions.

  * * *

  Halfholder was being well looked after—Defier's squod was wealthy and her quarters were lavish. She wasn't being told much, though. She talked to the extrajovians constantly, but there wasn't much worth telling. Admittedly, the EJs could do little to assist with the skydiver revolution, but she had a sneaking suspicion that it would be wise to keep them properly informed. The extrajovians sometimes saw the big picture more clearly, presumably because their minds were so alien . . . and Dingo had an impressive intuition for patterns of behavior. Surely it made sense to let the Poisonbluvians know how the revolution was progressing? After all, its main objective was their salvation . . . and the snowstone was less than a Jovian day away. However, she was not of the Instrumentality, and it was not her place to pass judgment on her betters.

  At that point two aides summoned her and the alien communication device to Defier's inner sanctum. They were flustered: something was going badly. She soon found out what. Just when the rogue wheelers were on the verge of taking control of all four Diversion Engine control complexes, all lines of communication with the Inner Moons had been cut off.

/>   «What is the situation?»

  «Frustrating. We have seized control of the Diversion Engines on Sixmoon, Sevenmoon, and Eightmoon. Unfortunately, Fivemoon was hidden from us by the bulk of Secondhome at a crucial period, and by the time our wheelers on the other three Inner Moons had established line-of-sight with Fivemoon, the Diversion Engines there had been locked off. You may not be aware of how the Engines function, but what this means, in essence, is that the Inner Moons are now fixed in their current configuration. Since we can no longer communicate with the Inner Moons, it seems that the plan to redirect the comet must fail.»

  Halfholder found the news difficult to credit. The Elders must have guessed the skydivers' intentions, for no news of the rogues' success would have been transmitted back to Secondhome's communicauts. «How can the Elders have known that our objective was not revolution on Secondhome, but control of the Diversion Engines?»

  Your objective, perhaps. Mine was always revolution . . . «The Elders are slow and hidebound by procedures—unless their personal safety is threatened. Then they become insightful and incisive. A spark of intuition? A customary precaution? A reminder from a protocol symbiaut attempting to curry favor? Who can know? Whatever the reason, we have lost our only channel to the Diversion Engines.»

  «Defier, you give up too easily! Do you not recall telling me that this moment had been ordained by the Lifesoul Cherisher? That the salvation of Poisonblue would prove the truth of our beliefs for all to see?» Halfholder was suddenly extremely angry. «You are betraying our principles in pursuit of a personality cult!»

  «Not at all. I just see no way to avoid the coming Poisonbluvian worldwreck.»

  «Nonsense, there must be some way to reestablish communication. Hijack an orbital transpaut! Send a team of rogues to Fivemoon!»

  «The spacefaring symbiauts have all been grounded as part of the communications blackout, Halfholder. There is nothing we can do from here. The revolution will continue by direct action, but until we take control of Secondhome and restore the communicants to normality the Inner Moons are beyond our reach.»

  Was Defter sincere? His words made sense. But. . . «Beyond our reach, yes! But not beyond the reach of the Poisonbluvians!»

  «I do not—»

  «They have their own false-cast transpauts, Defter! They can travel to Fivemoon! And they have a wheeler at their command, too!»

  «A good plan . . . and it would almost work,» said Defier sadly. «But the wheeler that they were using for discussions with the Elders is not a rogue, and we cannot pass on the requisite infofection from here.»

  Halfholders eye-ring glared at him. «Not that wheeler, you idiot!»

  20

  Europa Base, 2222

  Charles and Prudence huddled in a quiet corner of Europa Base. The Death Comet had passed inside the orbit of Leda and was fast approaching that of Callisto. On Earth, the people were going berserk, and Charles was being burned in effigy all over the planet. Martial law was in force across much of Ecotopia. Uhlirach-Bengtsen was being flamed all over the Xnet. The latest news from Halfholder was bad, too. Yes, the revolution was beginning to gain leverage as more and more citizens slipped into the oblivion of estivation, waiting out the conflict in the safety of their blisterponds; many Elders had joined them, unable to cope with the thought that they might soon be on the receiving end of the Jovian power structure. The comet, however, was now virtually unstoppable—unless the humans lent a helping hand.

  "I'll go," said Prudence, in a preemptive tone. "I've got thousands of hours in OWLs. And I've been to lo before, when I collected sulfur flowers. I'm used to piloting in dangerous situations."

  Charles wasn't going to argue with her. "Time's running out and there's a lot to do. I've put Wally Halberstam in charge of getting Reliant Robin reprogrammed." Reliant Robin, like all of the wheelers that Prudence had dug from Callisto's ice, was a rogue, a skydiver sympathizer. That's why he had been buried, as a punishment for an insurrection in which the Diversion Engines were damaged and a string of big comet fragments had actually hit Jupiter. And now his rogue programming might stop another from hitting the Earth. "Moses is acting as interpreter between us and the Jovians," Charles continued. "Reliant Robin can upload the instructions for the lo Diversion Engines from sound, so Halfholder's mob are getting hold of a wheeler who can convert squark wavepackets into radio, for us to pick up on our normal equipment. An OWL is being readied for immediate flight—don't worry, I'll let you know the departure time as soon as I know it. Once we've got Robin uploaded, everything will be ready to roll. But it's going to be tight, even so. Shit! I should have started all this much sooner, sorry."

  Prudence took pity on him. "Don't blame yourself too much, Charles. The skydivers aren't really ready now. If you'd started earlier, they'd have been even less ready."

  "Sure, but we could have thought it through and gotten Robin reprogrammed as a precau—" A face peered around the doorway. "Oh, Wally—you made me jump. How's the uploading going?"

  Halberstam glared at him. "There isn't going to be any uploading, Dunsmoore."

  "Are you crazy? It's the only way to get the lo Engine settings changed! I insist—"

  "'You are in no position to insist on anything. I'm taking charge. Your directorship is terminated, and you will be confined to your cubicle until this thing is ended. Trying to work through revolutionaries is a colossal blunder and it puts the whole of humanity at risk. I am an expert in hostage negotiations, and I am ordered to reopen contact with the Elders immediately."

  "Ordered?"

  "Military intelligence has taken over the mission. As senior agent at the scene, I have been given full command."

  "I had a feeling you were some kind of fink," said Prudence.

  "Wally, can't you see it's gone beyond that? The Elders aren't listening, they're—"

  "What you think is irrelevant. Dunsmoore: go to your quarters, now! I am placing you under arrest."

  "Wally, we're running out of time. The Elders aren't in the frame anymore. Don't do this—"

  "I said: now!" From his pocket, Halberstam pulled a small gun with a stubby barrel. "Dart gun," he explained superfluously. "Wouldn't want to blow a hole in the base, now, would we? Oh: for your information, the darts are poison-tipped, and fatal. And I'd quite enjoy using them on both of you, so don't tempt me."

  Prudence looked at Charles, raised her eyebrows toward the agent. Ij we both rush him at once, he can kill only one of us. Charles understood. He licked his lips, and gave her a quick thumbs-up, hidden from Halberstam's line of sight. Then he opened the palm of his hand, fingers spread— ready when you are. Prudence took a deep breath—

  A hand appeared over Halberstam's right shoulder and clamped on his chin. It jerked sharply, back and up. There was an audible crack as the agent's neck snapped, pinned by a forearm against its nape. The same hand removed the dart gun from his lifeless fingers before it could drop to the floor.

  "Moses."

  The boy stepped over the corpse and handed Prudence the gun. "I sensed treachery in this one long ago, Aunt Pru. I'm sorry I had to kill him. I've been trained, and I chose a quick method." He showed no sign of emotion: even his breathing was normal.

  Charles was still taking it all in. Prudence grabbed his arm. "The wheeler!" she yelled, and dragged him from the room, towing him behind her in the low gravity as she kicked and bounced along the corridors. Moses followed.

  Time had been short before. Now it was virtually nonexistent. Halberstams interference had put the uploading on hold, but fortunately he had not sabotaged the wheeler or the communicator—probably wanted to use them himself later, though God alone knew for what. The communicator howled and burbled as a stream of data packed itself away inside Reliant Robin's germanium mind.

  "I'll get on board the OWL," said Prudence. "Which one?"

  "Bay Five," Charles told her. She headed that way, at speed. Jonas filmed her departure.

  Moses waited until she had left. "And whic
h OWL will you be warming up, Charles?"

  "Who told you I was a qualified pilot? Bay Two. Are you going to tell her? I won't stop you."

  Moses seemed to think about it. Then he shook his head. "I would prefer my aunt to live, rather than you."

  Charles turned down the volume on the OWL's radio until Prudence's obscenities merged into a single meaningless stream. His plan had worked beautifully, and she hadn't suspected a thing until the restraints in Bay Five failed to swing free. By then, his OWL was well on the way to lo, with Reliant Robin strapped safely into the copilot's seat.

  I'll judge you by what you do, not by what you say . . . Well, Prudence was getting her chance to judge him, though he doubted it was what she'd had in mind. For once in his life, he was acting instead of talking—taking this one, god-given chance to redeem himself in Prudence's estimation, and his own. Most of his life had been meaningless. Now fate had presented him with one final opportunity to give it meaning, and he would seize that opportunity no matter what the risk.

  The comet had passed the orbit of Callisto. This was going to be a near thing.

  The restraints on Prudence's OWL would stay put: he'd given orders. Now she knew why he hadn't tried to argue her out of volunteering for the job. Finally he'd learned the virtues of action over words. Charles chuckled at the irony: he'd learned them from her. Then, with time to reflect, he had a moment of panic. Prudence was their most experienced pilot, and she did know lo. Was he gambling with the lives of every man, woman, and child on Earth? No, damn it. lo looked quiet and peaceful now, but that was deceptive. And soon ... I can't ask anyone else to take such a risk. This one's mine.

  Anyway, the descent to lo was mostly an autopilot job, and you didn't need a lot of experience for that. He'd had all the necessary training, and there'd been plenty of time to practice piloting OWLs during the voyage out to Europa. Skylark's virtual reality systems were excellent. It was the ascent that would stretch his skills to the limit . . . but he did not expect to return from lo.