Reality Matrix Effect (9781310151330)

by Mitchell, Laura Remson

  “Pull up a seat.”

  Rayna helped herself to one of two generously upholstered chairs across from the desk, then gestured toward the adjacent computer facilities. “Looks like pretty sophisticated stuff.”

  “Ah, yes. My command center, I call it. Not that I can really control the whole CDN from here. Still, it’s more than meets the eye.”

  “Oh?”

  Milgrom swept the room with an arm. “Most of the system’s components are behind the walls—not only in this room but in the lobby and all the other offices throughout the building. Pseudowalls. We can’t really wall in the electronics. We need easy access to them.”

  “I’d never have guessed.”

  “Unless you know what you’re looking for, the only way to be sure where the real paneling leaves off and the pseudowalls begin is by touch. Your hand will go right through a pseudowall, of course. A lot of public buildings use pseudowall technology now. You’ve probably seen it without realizing it. The clue is the pseudowall generator tracks on the ceiling. See?”

  Rayna’s gaze followed Milgrom’s pointing finger, but it was several seconds before she managed to identify the thin, recessed slits through which holographic projectors generated the false wall images.

  Milgrom turned to the bank of equipment on her right and punched up an order for two cups of coffee. A moment later, two steaming mugs appeared on a small Trans-Mat receiving platform.

  “Here you are,” she said, sliding a cup across the desk to Rayna. Black with sugar, right?”

  Rayna’s eyebrows jumped in surprise. “Yes, but—”

  “How did I know? You forget, I am director of the largest database the world has ever known.”

  Suddenly, Rayna felt queasy. “You mean you keep that kind of information on everybody?”

  Milgrom laughed and waved her hand casually. “No, of course not. The system has plenty of safeguards to prevent invasion of privacy. Of course, that doesn’t mean much to Adm. Rensselaer. He’s been making all sorts of unsubstantiated charges about the CDN—and me—lately.”

  “Then, how...?”

  “You entered it yourself when you took that cup of coffee in the lobby.”

  Rayna’s heart resumed beating. Milgrom looked like the last hope for stopping Tauber. She seemed trustworthy, but....

  “Damn!”

  Rayna jumped at Milgrom’s outburst. Wheelchair drawn close to the terminal, the CDN director began working single-mindedly at the keyboard, pausing on occasion only to scowl at the screen and then press some more keys. After a while, she shook her head unhappily.

  “I’m sorry, Miss Kingman. I thought I could manage to get away from this for an hour or so, but things are happening very fast. I need to give it my complete attention. We can reschedule your tour, but I’m afraid you’ll have to leave now.”

  Rayna leaned forward, craning her neck for a better view of Milgrom’s terminal. “No,” she said, “I can’t do that.”

  Milgrom sat in stunned silence for several seconds before she managed to say, “You don’t understand. I apologize for being rude, but—”

  “You don’t understand,” said Rayna. “This new crisis—” she jerked her head toward the terminal “—it’s about the colonies, isn’t it?”

  “Yes, and it’s urgent. I don’t have time to be polite.”

  Rayna stood and peered down at the petite woman in the wheelchair. “Neither do I. I came here because I have something vital to tell you. I don’t intend to leave until I’ve done just that.” In a softer tone she added, “Please. It’s important, and it may help.”

  Milgrom looked at Rayna through narrowed eyes, then patted the air. “Sit,” she said, tapping a key on her console. “Derek?”

  A section of pseudowall to Milgrom’s right flashed out of existence to reveal Derek Marsden’s surprised face peering from a large communicator screen. “Still checking, Althea,” he began. “I’m pretty sure that—”

  “Put the trace on automatic,” his boss told him. “I need you in here.”

  “But you said—”

  “I know what I said. Apparently, we have some new information.” Milgrom glanced at Rayna. “I need you here now, Derek.”

  Marsden shrugged, and the screen went blank as the pseudowall closed over it. A moment later, the lanky CDN man walked through a nearby wall.

  “So far, I’m still going on hunches,” he said, but I really think—” He did a double-take as he noticed Rayna’s wide-eyed stare. “Oops. Sorry. I keep forgetting what it looks like to people who aren’t used to pseudowalls.” He grinned. “That’s just a door, Miss Kingman. We keep the pseudowall over it whenever we have meetings. Gives us whatever privacy we need. The combination of a restrictive sound envelope and holographic projection does the job better than solid walls usually do.”

  Instinctively, Rayna searched the ceiling over the section of wall through which Marsden had entered until she located the generator tracks.

  “Miss Kingman says she has some important information for us,” Milgrom told him as he pulled the vacant chair closer to the writing desk.

  Rayna felt herself wither under the gaze of the two CDN officials. Until this moment, she hadn’t given much thought to exactly what she would say. Her throat was dry, and her mind was a blank.

  “I...uh...I’m not sure where to begin. You did say at the debate that you were suspicious about recent communications from the colonies, didn’t you? The communications about the Nitinol?”

  Milgrom nodded, her expression noncommittal.

  “Well,” Rayna stammered, “I have reason to believe that those communications were faked by someone right here on Earth.”

  “Go on.”

  Rayna sipped her coffee. How much should she say? That knowing look between them...the slight stiffening of their features...the very lack of any comment on her revelation—it could all add up to very cautious allies or very dangerous adversaries. She shunted her fear into a back corner of her mind. There was no time for that now. They were her only real hope. Nevertheless, she would play it safe. Until she knew much more about these two, she wouldn’t mention Keith’s name, or how she’d gotten her information.

  “The messages are part of a bigger plan of some kind,” Rayna told them at last. “It seems to involve high-level people all over the world, especially those with ties to the Merchant Fleet.”

  Marsden blanched. “Can you prove that?”

  “I came here hoping the CDN could help get the proof! We couldn’t go to the Merchant Fleet, after all. It looks like even Ethan Rensselaer’s involved.”

  “Who’s ‘we?’” Marsden challenged. “Who’s your source?”

  Rayna picked up her cup once more, then quickly put it back down, trying covertly to steady her shaking hands. This wasn’t going at all the way she’d expected. Marsden was interrogating her as if she were a criminal. “I can’t tell you who I’m working with,” she whispered. “It might endanger someone I care a great deal about.”

  Marsden’s expression was chilly and unrelenting. “Then why should we believe you?”

  Rayna looked from Milgrom to her assistant and back again. She felt her shoulders sag. Funny. She’d never considered the possibility that they wouldn’t believe her.

  “I just assumed that—” She swallowed, squared her shoulders and stood up. “My mistake. If you don’t want to listen, I guess there’s nothing more I can do here. I’m sorry I wasted your time.”

  “Wait, Miss Kingman,” Milgrom said. “Please. Sit down.”

  “Listen, Althea,” Marsden began, “we need solid information from reliable sources, not just rumors. Besides, we can’t let just anybody get too close to you. After that second attack—”

  “What?” Rayna croaked. “What second attack? You mean something happened after the debate?”

  “Yes. About two weeks ago. A package addressed to Althea was booby-trapped. Old-fashioned, but potentially effective. Fortunately, it went off prematurely, and no one was hurt.�
�

  “And you think that I...?”

  “I’m a careful man, Miss Kingman. I’ve learned the hard way that it pays to be careful. Althea’s a very special lady, and I—”

  “Derek,” said Milgrom, “you worry too much. Besides, Miss Kingman has already saved my life. Remember? If she wanted to hurt me, she could have simply walked away when that thug tried to club me. Would have saved herself a nasty bump on the head in the bargain. No, I think we can trust her. And I think we owe her an explanation, too.”

  Marsden was all wary eyes and catlike alertness, but he finally assented, and Rayna released the breath she never realized she’d been holding. “I’d really appreciate that explanation, Mrs. Milgrom.”

  “Althea. My name’s Althea. I think it’s time for us all to be on a first-name basis.”

  Rayna agreed, and Milgrom continued: “You’re perfectly correct about the faked messages, Rayna. We can thank Derek, here, for that discovery, by the way. He spotted things in the messages that most of us would never have noticed.”

  “It was the codes they used,” Marsden volunteered, his hostility thawing a bit. “The ‘colonial’ messages were sent using codes for a different colony than the initial traces suggested as the true source.”

  Rayna frowned. “I’m not sure I—”

  “It’s like this, Miss Kingman—uh, Rayna. Normally, we just take it for granted that a message comes from the person or place it claims to come from. You get a message that says it’s from Luna, you figure it came from Luna. There’s no reason to bother correlating the transmission code numbers with the astronomical data. But this Nitinol ultimatum seemed so outrageous that we decided to verify its point of origin.”

  “Derek’s being modest, Rayna. He was the only one in the office who thought about checking the origin. He used a special communications tracer he developed back in his Merchant Fleet days—”

  “You were in the Merchant Fleet?” Rayna interrupted, wrapping her suddenly cold hands around her coffee cup.

  Marsden nodded. “For a while.”

  “Yes,” said Milgrom, “Derek had a terrible accident out in the colonies about three years ago. Nearly killed him.”

  “I don’t hold any grudge against the colonists, though,” Marsden quickly added. “One drunk nearly cut my head off, but afterward, the whole colony concentrated its resources on saving me. If it wasn’t for those colonists—and the medical information in the CDN—I’d be dead.”

  “And if it weren’t for what Derek learned while he was in the Fleet, we’d have no evidence whatsoever to suggest that the colonial ultimatum was anything but genuine.”

  Rayna suspected that she was supposed to feel reassured now, but she remained uneasy. Maybe it was just paranoia. Marsden’s Merchant Fleet connections made her nervous—made her think of the ominous shadow in her dream. Still, she already had revealed the essence of what she and Keith knew. She had to trust someone. If not Marsden, then at least Milgrom.

  “If you have evidence that the communications were faked, why hasn’t the Secretary-General reopened negotiations with the colonies?”

  “It’s not quite that simple,” Milgrom answered. “The evidence we have isn’t entirely clear. It can be interpreted in a number of ways, and the Secretary-General doesn’t believe in taking chances. Until we can prove things aren’t as they seem, he feels he has no choice but to base his actions on the assumption that the messages—and the ultimatums—are genuine.”

  Rayna covered her eyes and shook her head. “Then, if you can’t get the proof....”

  “But we can get the proof! In fact, we almost have it now. Right, Derek?” Marsden nodded. “You see, Derek needed a new message he could track as it was coming in. He was able to get the information to set up his tracer by analyzing the data burst from the ‘colonial’ ultimatum—when they set the Nov. 1 deadline for tripling the price of Nitinol.”

  “Was that when they threatened to increase the tab even more if we didn’t go along with them?”

  “Yeah,” Marsden muttered. “They said that after Nov. 1, they were going to start charging us a daily storage fee for the Nitinol. The storage fee would be added to the cost of redeeming the shipment. Pretty clever, actually. The longer we take to agree to their demands, the higher the price automatically goes.”

  Rayna didn’t think it was so clever. “I remember when the ultimatum was announced,” she said. “Even some of my most sensible friends started talking about taking the shipment back by force. Of course, the fact that no one had a clue about where the Nitinol was didn’t seem to bother anybody.”

  Marsden shrugged. “What I don’t understand is why they would have loused up a good thing like that by destroying the Nitinol. If they really destroyed it.”

  “According to my source,” Rayna said carefully, “the Nitinol’s been destroyed all right, but it looks as though that wasn’t really part of the plan.”

  Marsden looked intrigued and seemed about to pursue the subject further when Milgrom interrupted. “The point is that back when we got the first messages about the Nitinol demands, we still didn’t have any conclusive evidence about what was really going on. We had to wait for another ultimatum.”

  “That came this morning,” Marsden put in.

  Rayna could hardly breathe. “That’s the crisis you were talking about earlier?”

  Milgrom nodded. “We have the proof now. Or at least we will when the trace is complete.”

  “The trace is still running,” Marsden added, “but it looks like an old trick some Merchant Fleet pals and I used to play around with when we wanted to confuse the computers. We rerouted the messages, altering the coding along the way, so that if you didn’t know what was going on, you’d never be able to follow it to the source.”

  “As soon as Derek’s trace is final, I’ll be able to take a printout to the United Nations and show the world’s leaders that we’re not really dealing with renegade colonists.”

  Momentarily, Rayna felt a weight lift from her, but then Milgrom shook her head. “Unfortunately, it may be too late to calm the public—especially after the destruction of the Nitinol. We still have to depend on the colonies for our Nitinol supplies, and people are awfully angry.”

  Yes, Rayna knew how angry people were. She saw it up close at the debate. “But if you have the proof....”

  “You don’t understand,” Marsden said, fixing her with haunted blue-gray eyes. “We can provide them with the facts, but we can’t make the politicians face those facts. And we can’t make the public believe them, either.”

  He removed an Astobac cigarette from a case in his pocket, lit up and took a puff. As he exhaled, the smoke reacted with the air and broke down into its component elements, dispersing harmlessly. “It’s much easier to blame a scapegoat than to face a complicated problem,” he continued. “And over the last few months, the colonies have become a handy scapegoat for just about every problem we have here on Earth.”

  Rayna wanted to disagree, but she knew Marsden was right. “Just what’s the latest threat?” she asked.

  Milgrom nodded at Marsden. “Go ahead Derek. You can explain it better than I can.”

  Marsden puffed on his cigarette before speaking. “Do you know what a ZAP miner is?”

  The question took Rayna by surprise. “Why, no. I don’t think I ever—”

  “ZAP miners,” he repeated. “The ‘Z-A-P’ stands for Zhang Amplified Packbeam. Zhang was a colonial engineer. He figured out that mining operations would be most efficient if preliminary excavation work was done by precision, computer-targeted, space-mounted lasers, leaving the more detailed work of actual mineral extraction for robots and colonists using smaller tools on the asteroid’s surface.”

  Rayna wondered why Marsden should launch into a lesson on colonial mining in the midst of a crisis. “What does all that have to do with—”

  “Bear with me for a minute,” Marsden said with a wave of his cigarette. “The problem was that laser beams tende
d to spread out too much over orbital distances. So Zhang came up with a new system that packed laser-generated light waves into dense, red beams that could slice through the hardest terrain. These days, zappers are very common in the mining colonies.”

  “I still don’t see what all that has to do with the Nitinol crisis and the faked communications.”

  Marsden took a deep drag on his cigarette. “The zappers can be programmed to hit any target. Even on Earth.”

  Rayna froze, her coffee cup halfway to her mouth.

  “According to the latest message,” Milgrom said, “the ‘colonists’ have sent a number of modified ZAP miners into orbit around Earth, and more are on the way. The message says they will be used against unnamed targets here if Earth takes any hostile action against the colonies.” Milgrom looked solemnly at Rayna. “They didn’t bother to define what they meant by ‘hostile.’ It could mean anything from trying to recapture the Nitinol by force to blockading the R-4 Sector.”

  Rayna thought furiously.

  “They’re in Earth orbit now,” Marsden said. “Must have left R-4 before the Nov. 1 deadline, or they couldn’t have reached us already. That’s sure to make tensions worse once the public realizes it.”

  “But how did the—?”

  “How did the zappers get through? That’s an easy one. No one ever thought of ZAP miners as weapons, or of Earth as being at war. Everyone apparently figured somebody else had authorized repair or service checkout for the mining equipment. There was nothing to prevent the zappers from taking critical positions around the world.”

  Rayna felt the dream-shadow closing in. “But there must be something we can do. Knock them out of the sky, maybe.”

  “Unfortunately,” said Milgrom, “we can’t knock them all out at once. If we blow one up, another could still devastate parts of the planet. And we don’t have any idea which areas are at risk.”

  Rayna shook her head. “It must be a bluff,” she decided.

  “All we know for sure,” said Marsden, “is that there really are ZAP miners surrounding the Earth, and the only place you’d normally find so many zappers is in a mining colony. The public would know that, too.”