Together Dr. Lee and Ellen had cleared Jory off the operating table to make way for the suffering young Chinese. Den Ostreicher lay now in the outer chamber, with his silver boxes screwed together and the bone disks loosely fitted back into the holes in his skull. But Dr. Lee had reconnected nothing and restarted none of his systems. If Jory survived, he would be a boy again—a boy with a large memory deficit and a badly damaged immune system, about to slough off several prosthetics and fifteen kilograms of polymer skin that his natural body had been trying to reject for more than a decade. Jory might even live through the experience, with a lot of emergency medical assistance.
He probably wouldn’t get it in time, Sorbel thought coldly. She felt like an army general brought up from the rear to fight an exposed salient that was crumbling around her. Everything she did this night only made things worse.
“Now hold that!” Dr. Lee ordered.
“What?” She roused from her torpor.
“That!” He took her unsterile finger and guided it inside the end of his cut into Te Jing’s throat, pressing it down through layers of slippery red membrane. At one point, she felt a jagged piece of bone and almost got sick. He pushed her finger deeper, until she was wedging the opening wide.
Jeff Te Jing’s body shuddered and drew a full, ragged breath.
Ellen fought to divorce her mind from her finger and what it could feel.
At that moment, Willie Lao stuck his head through the connecting tunnel. He was another of Lole’s security people, some distant relation to Te Jing, she thought.
“No sign of the woman.”
Dr. Lee looked up, distracted, and then bent again over the injured throat.
“Um,” Sorbel temporized. “Coordinate with Lole, will you? We’re busy here.”
“No sign of Lole, either.”
“Well, then page him through—no, I guess you can’t.” Using the grid’s resources to search for Lole would tip their hand, wouldn’t it? Ellen tried to collect her thoughts and ignore the warmth flowing over her knuckles. “Did you check Coghlan’s hotel?”
“She hasn’t been back—not since earlier.”
“How about the outside airlocks? Lole thought she would go that way.”
“All the way up to the pressure doors,” he nodded. “No record of anyone going through them, though, not for the past four hours.”
Ellen was stumped. “How many of our people can you rouse?”
“This hour? Maybe ten…fifteen.”
Not enough to check twenty thousand cubic meters by visual reconnaissance, she decided. Not in a day. Not even in a week.
Slow down and figure things out one at a time, Ellen told herself. If Lole had not found Demeter by now, he would certainly have reported in—either returning to their secret room himself, or sending someone with the bad news. And if Lole had found Demeter, he would have brought her back here—or stashed her in some safe place and then sent word. Either way, he was now long overdue and could be presumed missing.
“Missing” was her minds own euphemism, Sorbel realized with cold shock. Spell it out! The grid was running Demeter Coghlan, the same as it ran Jory and the Korean. If Lole had tangled with her and come up missing, then there really were only two choices. He was dead. Or he was the grid’s captive and soon would be wired up to tell the machines everything he knew.
Ellen accepted neither of those choices. Not for her Lole!
But what could she do to deflect them?
Well…if he was still a prisoner, then maybe she had time to intercede before he became one more of the walking dead.
Dr. Lee was still probing for bone pieces in Te Jing’s throat. Ellen withdrew her finger, and the slit closed around his forceps.
“Hey! What’re you doing?”
“Forget that for now” She wiped her hand on a fold of the body’s sleeve. “We’ve got to move Lethe.”
“But this man will—”
“Yeah, die, I know.” She studied the cabling among the rogue computer’s central processor, its memory modules, and its inventory of peripherals. She wanted to make the fewest disconnections to separate out a working cyber that the three of them could carry. “And so will Lole—die—unless we can get this machine out of here.”
“Where are you taking it?” the doctor asked.
“Somewhere we can make a solid linkup with the grid, preferably by radio.”
“Why?”
“So we can begin passing some access codes.”
Dr. Lee looked down at the man on the operating table. Te Jing’s throat was barely oozing now, and his chest was still. Ellen knew what the doctor was thinking: so many deaths this night, so many wrong moves.
Wa Lixin sighed. “I can’t help him anyway.”
From the entry way, Lao ducked his face and turned away.
“Willie!” Ellen snapped. “We need you, too.”
Tharsis Montes Space Fountain, June 20
“I’m sorry, Demeter,” Roger Torraway said. The Cyborg had relaxed noticeably and now he was sitting cross-legged on the walker’s deck in a less alert—and subtly more human—posture. Coghlan even fancied she could hear regret in that detached and perfectly mechanical voice.
“Where are you taking us?” she asked.
All she could see out the vehicle’s side windows was stars, shining pinpricks in the black sky. It seemed as if the trip up the fountain had reversed time and overcome the dawn. The angled sunlight shining on the walker’s outer hull could not blunt the gemfield displayed above them.
“I’m not taking you—” the Cyborg began, then paused. “Well, not anymore. I was under external control, putatively from the cybernetic nexus you know as ‘the grid.’ What its…their…the nexus’s plans are, I never was made aware. We are clearly riding the space fountain into low Mars orbit. From there, I don’t know…”
“Back in the tunnels, you spoke about ‘a safe place,’” Lole said. “What does that mean?”
“I don’t…I remember it felt like a place that the grid controls. Where no other person…persona?…intelligence?…could possibly interfere with its intentions toward you.”
“Toward us, now,” Demeter observed.
The Colonel’s dark lips pulled upward in a smile, and she realized he was grateful at being included in their plight. Demeter suddenly understood how terribly lonely it must have been, wandering the open countryside for decades with only other machines and half-disemboweled humans for company. This might be the first time he had made common cause with human beings in almost fifty years—not since he had left Earth and the support of the Cyborg laboratory at Tonka, in old Oklahoma State.
“We’re going to the new solar station,” Lole said. “It has to be there.”
“Of course!” Demeter had momentarily forgotten about the mysterious construction. “The one that the machines are building by remote control. But is there a…place aboard it for us humans? Someplace we can breathe. I thought it would be all external surfaces and exposed structure.”
“You visited there, by proxy, didn’t you?” Lole asked.
“There or someplace by mistake. But I do remember a machine that was building a curved wall of heavy metal panels. It might be some kind of an environmental pod, although I got the impression of really thick plates and—oh yeah!—double walls, like for an insulating layer or a—”
“A rocket motor,” Torraway supplied. “More precisely, a combustion chamber.”
“Why would you think that?” Demeter wondered.
“I did have some astronaut training, you know.”
“Yes,” she agreed, “it could have been a motor. And a big one, judging from the curvature of that inner wall.”
“That confirms something Jory said,” Lole put in. “The grid was putting engines on the solar platform. It was going places, he said.”
“This was the grid talking?” Demeter guessed.
“No, later, when we had him under sedation. We had already, um, severed his links to the grid by the
n. He was speaking true.”
“The grid is going to put us aboard the platform and then send it somewhere,” she summed up, feeling her way. “Somewhere safe. Now, where would that be? Back to Earth? Out to the Asteroid Belt? Europa?”
“Whatever the grid does,” Lole said, “it had better move soon. Once Ellen figures out we’re hostages, she’s likely to take action.”
“What can she do?” Demeter shrugged.
“She’s got a virus planted deep in the Mars nexus, spread across a dozen or more cybers that hold tokens on the system. Once she activates it, the program will phage the grid’s higher operating levels but leave the individual computers that control mechanical functions in the tunnels. Poof! No more collective intelligence.”
“That’s dangerous!” Torraway exploded.
“Yeah, poof! No more us,” Demeter observed quietly. “If we’re in transit when the system falls—”
Suddenly, Lole was trying to sound conciliatory. “Presumably, there are backups to maintain our life support and—”
Torraway wasn’t buying. “How long until she pulls the plug?”
“Well, Ellen thought she could assemble the virus segments and get it rolling in less than an hour. Add to that the time she needs to get Lethe—that’s our unregistered cyber—physically into position to make radio contact and launch its attack on the grid’s security systems. And, for uncertainty, add the time she needs to personally decide that the grid has taken us hostage and that she needs to do something, so—”
“Four hours? Three?” the Colonel demanded.
“More like two.” Lole was chewing his lower lip.
“Still not enough time,” Torraway said.
“For what?” Demeter asked.
“We’re already there.”
Those bright stars disappeared above them, blotted out by the dark underside of the transfer station that rode at the top of the fountain. Outside the walker’s side windows, Demeter saw the lower perimeter of a handling bay descend in a muted twinkle of position and docking lights and the shadows of huge magnetic grapples.
Clang! Demeter felt more than heard the dogs around the edge of the rising cargo platform release themselves while the stage slowed its ascent. The walker’s deckplates surged beneath her as the vehicle lost upward momentum and went weightless in orbit. The fountainhead’s controls wasted no time. Before the package represented by the walker and its inhabitants could drift out of position, the magnetic grapples caught it and slung it sideways.
Clearly, the automated equipment was used to handling inert machinery and containers, not occupied vehicles. The force of the change in vector threw Demeter forward, snapping open the buckle on her seat belt, dashing her against the sharp edges of the control panel.
On his own side of the cockpit, Lole—being taller, with a higher center of gravity—somersaulted over the panel and went upside down, heels and ass leading, against the windshield. He struck with what looked like enough force to break the glass but didn’t.
Torraway folded and clattered into the backs of the two command chairs, getting himself wedged in sideways and crumpling the support pinion on one of his solar panels.
The walker immediately shunted in the opposite direction, still accelerating. Demeter fell back into her seat, cracking her elbow on Torraway’s head. Lole flopped back over the control console. The idiot lights on the panel flared briefly underneath him, and the walker extended all eight of its legs.
Bang! One of the legs sheared off against a grappler head somewhere along the station’s internal pathways. An instant later, the crippled walker emerged from an empty docking bay, into the starry void. The impetus from the collision made the vehicle spin slowly, its legs clutched halfway inward again, like a dead spider being washed down the drain.
A mild centrifugal force pinned Demeter against the console again, reawakening old bruises. Lole was stuffed quietly—he seemed to be unconscious—against the forward bulkhead below the windshield. Torraway had not yet fought free of his niche between the fixed sliders of the two seats.
“How fast would you say we are moving?” he asked placidly, his head and neck still caught under a chair arm.
Demeter lifted her gaze to the whirling starfield out the front window. She instantly wanted to be sick but controlled the urge.
“I don’t…know, not…too fast.”
“Tens of kilometers per second? Thousands?”
“Hundreds…I can’t tell.”
“The Number Six solar power satellite is probably two or three thousand klicks from the transfer station. We’ve got a few minutes yet.” The Cyborg paused. “Not long enough.”
“Long enough for what?” she wanted to know.
“To get this hulk de-spun and stabilized. But then, without attitude controls, we won’t be able to do it at all. Of course, there’s no reason to put vector thrusters on a ground-pounder in the first place,” he conceded.
“Are you tired of this spin already?” Demeter asked sarcastically.
“It’s a matter of survival. The grid’s observation points are fairly limited in space. It may not know that we’ve screwed up and are no longer oriented the way we were when those grapples gave us our last push.”
“Too bad.”
“Yeah, especially when we come up to the docking ring or whatever the nexus has prepared for us at the satellite. At this rate, we’re likely to crash into it sideways.” With an almost gentle surge, Torraway untangled his head. One solar wing fluttered weakly behind him. “I wonder if this hull will withstand the impact.”
“You can breathe vacuum, can’t you?” she asked.
“Yes, I can. But you two can’t.”
Chapter 20
Interview with MFSTO:
Somewhere in Orbit, June 20
Lole Mitsuno woke up with a low, throbbing headache. He uncramped his long body from its awkward position against the walker’s forward bulkhead. That took some doing: “down” was no longer the deck but the vehicle’s front end. He braced a hand against the windshield and stared out, down, at the spinning stars.
He glanced back at his friends. Demeter had strapped herself in against the spin, tying the broken ends of harness across her lap. Torraway had taken the other command chair and likewise belted himself tight. One of the Colonel’s wings was bent out of shape, with a possibly broken strut; it seemed to move less freely than its counterpart on his opposite shoulder. Otherwise, Lole’s companions seemed unhurt.
Mitsuno himself could catalog aches and bruises, a wrist that felt swollen and might be sprained, and that cursed headache. But he had no broken bones, no bleeding. He looked back out the window, made a rough estimate of their rate of spin: four revolutions per minute. That wasn’t anything the grid had planned for them.
“We’re in trouble, aren’t we?” he said.
“Looks like it,” Torraway agreed.
“I do hate feeling helpless.”
Lole didn’t bother even glancing at the control console: nothing there would serve them in freefall. The designers of this machine had never considered it might have to operate off the planet’s surface. He returned his attention to the windshield, trying to decide through feel how it was holding up to vacuum. Despite what he had told Demeter, this hull was experiencing conditions for which it was never designed. For that matter, when they got where they were going, would the airlock ring align with whatever arrangements the grid had built into its orbiting platform? It would be tragic, wouldn’t it, to die for want of a few millimeters of clearance.
Of course, the three of them had worse problems right then.
Mitsuno studied the revolving starfield, hoping to spot the power station ahead of them and so get a feel for how long it would be before they had to do something heroic. With only the stars above and the broad face of Mars below—and that with only the looming dawn by which to mark any relative direction—Lole had no good feeling for their proper motion. The walker’s terrain-scanning radar was useless at th
ese extreme distances.
With even their sluggish rate of spin, Mitsuno had trouble telling exactly what part of each revolution represented the view “ahead” and what was “behind.” The fountain’s dark transfer station with its various guide lights had totally disappeared against the black stellar background. So he watched it all.
Lole strained to pick out any large object that seemed to be growing nearer. He knew that sunlight reflected from the station’s solar panels, which would be turning slowly with the synchronous orbit, would probably flash gently rather than remaining fixed like the star points. That was some help.
One of the stars had developed a mild purple bloom, off to one side, the right color for emissions from an ion engine. Still, Mitsuno watched it for three revolutions, forty-five seconds, before letting himself believe in the apparition. Finally, the star developed into a cluster of dusty, winking lights: it was an orbital tug, headed their way. Mitsuno pointed it out to Coghlan and Torraway.
The Cyborg keyed the walker’s radio to the all-call frequency.
“Emergency, emergency, emergency,” he said in a reasonable, unhurried voice. “Stranded—um—cargo pod to unidentified towing vehicle in orbit above Valles Marineris, please respond.”
They waited.
No reply.
The tug was showing a hull outline now, and its maneuvering jets were beginning to resolve into plumes of translucent vapor. Its grapples were at full extension, reaching out toward the walker. The approaching vessel was moving into an intricate dance.
“What’s it doing?” Demeter asked.
“I’d say it was preparing to latch on,” Torraway replied. “Then it will try to de-spin us.”
“Why don’t they answer?”
“They can’t, if it’s an automated ship. Some of them roam in orbit, for retrieval of wayward cargo and drifting debris.”
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