by Paul Preuss
Someone was looking through its eyes, controlling its every move—
—until Blake flew deftly toward its head, aiming a fire extinguisher as he came, pressing its trigger, covering its eyes with thick foam…
“Aaahh!” Blake’s cry was sharp, quickly stifled. The robot had swiveled as he’d passed; a radiator had come within inches of his arm; The Seven Pillars of Wisdom had exploded in flames. Frantically he turned the fire extinguisher on the book, then on himself, on his burning jacket.
The huge robot was thrown into a frenzy, writhing and slashing. It had lost its purchase, lost its view, like a beetle flipped on its back. But in seconds it would get a grip on something, tear into some fixed structure. Then surely its remote operator, forced to settle for efficient death, would ignore personal revenge and simply use the machine to smash through Star Queen’s windows.
Meanwhile the berserk and fiery robot dominated the flight deck, blocking their escape; even if it never got a good foothold it would kill them by setting them afire, melting the cabin around them.
Sparta knew what she had to do. It would leave her utterly vulnerable. The thought flashed through her brain that she couldn’t trust Blake Redfield, and instantly the rest of her brain said store it, first things first.
She fell into trance. The ultra-high frequency datastream—the frantic-smelling datastream, the hate-filled datastream of the robot’s controlling transmission—flowed into her mind. She raised her arms and hands and curved them in an antenna’s arc. Her belly burned. She beamed the message.
The robot jerked spasmodically and then froze.
She had it like a cat, by the scruff of its neck, clamped in her mind instead of her fist—but it took all her concentration to do it. She could override the strong signal from the nearby transmitter only because she was a few feet from the robot; the power stored in the batteries beneath her lungs would trickle away in less than a minute.
“Blake!” The word was plosive, hollow. “Pull the fuel capsule,” she gasped. Her beam wavered and the creature twitched violently.
Blake gaped at her. She hung like a levitating Minoan priestess in the lurid light, her arms curved into hooks, conferring a savage benediction. She forced out the words, thin as husks: “In its belly. Pull it.”
He moved at last, under it, between its wavering legs and claws. Above the paralyzed machine the ceiling was charring from the heat of the radiators; the smoldering plastic padding began pouring acrid smoke into the room. Blake fumbled at the fuel port—she wanted to tell him what to do but she didn’t dare—and after a moment he figured it out and got the port open.
Then he was stymied again. He paused to study the fuel cell assembly for endless seconds.
He saw that it was made for safety, for simplicity. It was, after all, a Rolls-Royce. He wrapped his fingers around the chrome staples of the fuel assembly, braced his feet against the robot’s shell, and pulled.
The fuel assembly slid out. Its cladding telescoped to shield it as he withdrew it. In that instant the massive robot was gutted, dead. Its radiators cooled—
—not soon enough to prevent the ceiling exploding into flames.
“Damn it, there’d better be another fire extinguisher in here,” he shouted.
There was. Sparta yanked it from its bracket, shot past him, and covered the blazing padding with creamy foam. She emptied the bottle on it, then flung it away.
They looked at each other—keyed up, the pair of them—exasperated, singed and sooty, choking on smoke, and then he managed a grin. She forced herself to return it. “Let’s get those suits on before we suffocate.”
He put on McNeil’s, she Wycherly’s. As she was bleeding some of Wycherly’s oxygen into McNeil’s empty tank, she paused. She’d had another inspiration.
“Blake … it was Sylvester who stole the book—who had it stolen. And I think I know where it is now.”
“She had a case of other books aboard, but I looked in there…”
“So did I. This is a guess. Don’t hold it against me if I’m wrong.” She twisted the oversize spacesuit’s gloves and yanked them off.
“Where are you going?”
“I need my fingers for this.”
She pulled herself back to the flight deck. She moved between the claws and legs of the inert robot until she found its main processor access. She opened the port and reached inside.
Blake watched her from the ceiling, barely visible in the dark. “What are you doing in there?” She’d been at it for what seemed a long time.
“I’m going to have to reinsert the fuel assembly. Don’t worry, it’s lobotomized now.”
He said nothing. He couldn’t think of anything to say except, you must be crazy.
When the fuel assembly slid into the robot its head wobbled, its claws clashed feebly, but its movements were those of a drugged rhinoceros. Sparta, tiny inside Wycherly’s borrowed suit, moved into the robot’s sluggish embrace again and reached into the processor. Motors whined. The robot’s abdomen split down the center and unfolded in layer upon layer of compound chambers, until the complex metal intestines of the ore-processing cavity lay exposed. In the grisly light the machine seemed to have disemboweled itself.
Sparta pulled herself over the carapace of the gutted robot and peered inside. There, propped between two massive worm gears in a mesh of tube snouts and grillwork, nestled a fragile, beautiful book, snug in its slipcase.
19
The lights came on first, and spacesuited teams of workers moved efficiently into the empty security sector, evacuated both of people and of air, to replace the blown pressure hatch. Within half an hour of the emergency, the core had been repressurized and business had resumed as usual.
Before that, while air was still flowing back into the Q3 lock, a patrol squad, pressure-suited and with stunguns drawn, burst into Star Queen. They were hardened cops, used to dealing with drunkenness and homicidal rage and other forms of insanity that commonly afflict the human residents of space stations, but the destruction astonished them.
For one thing, they’d had few occasions to see, up close, the mining robots that prowled the surface of the planet beneath them, the machines that paid all their salaries, and to find one looming amid the wreckage of Star Queen’s bridge, even exposed and enfeebled, was plain terrifying. They approached the machine as divers might approach a comatose great white shark.
Except for the robot, which proved disabled, the ship was deserted. For a long time none of the patrollers noticed that the two spacesuits which had hung on the stores deck were missing.
Sparta and Blake had ditched the suits five minutes after they’d put them on. Again they’d taken to the darkened ventilator shafts, the conduits. She knew the back ways as he could not, having stored a thousand engineering diagrams in her memory, but he’d been careful to memorize what he needed to know about the internal layout of Port Hesperus before he’d left Earth, even then planning his assault on Star Queen.
“Three half-ounce wads of plastique on a timer for the pressure hatch,” he told her. “Cutter charge on the auxiliary cables, also on a timer. Threw the main bus breakers myself—wanted to make sure I didn’t do any real damage. A couple of the power plant workers will have ether hangovers…”
“C-4? Not fulminate of gold? Acetylene detonators?” They spoke on the move, chasing each other through the shadowy maze.
“Who’d use that junk? That’s dangerous as hell.”
“Somebody who didn’t care about danger and wanted the debris to look like an explosion in a fuel cell.”
“Star Queen was sabotaged?”
“You may be the last person in the solar system to hear the news. Assuming you didn’t do it yourself.”
He laughed.
“I need the rest of your story, Blake, before I make up my mind what to do with you.”
“Let’s stop here a minute,” he said. Following a manifold of pipes and cables, they had reached the mid-region of the core. They were in
a substation, surrounded by huge pumps and fat gray transformers; the twilight gloom was striped with bright bars of light projected from a grating below, creeping slowly with the station’s rotation. Through the bars they could see straight into the central sphere, ringed with trees and gardens and the twin concourses of the station’s social center.
“I didn’t take explosives courses in SPARTA, Linda—”
“Don’t call me that, ever.” Her angry warning echoed in the metal chamber.
“It’s too late. They know who you are.”
“Yeah? Well I know who they are.” Her voice betrayed her, for she was tired, and the fear surfaced. “What I don’t know is where they are.”
“One of them is here, on this station. Looking for you. That’s why I went for all the fireworks—so I could get to you alone. Before they did.”
“Who is it?”
“I don’t think I’d recognize him. Or her. Maybe you would.”
“Dammit.” She sighed. “Start from the beginning, will you?”
He took a breath, closed his eyes, and let his breath out slowly. When he opened his dark eyes they glowed in the warm light from below. “SPARTA broke up a year after you left it. There were probably a dozen of us at my level then, the sixteen-and seventeen-year-olds—Ron, Khalid, Sara, Louis, Rosaria…”
She interrupted him. “That far back my memory is excellent.”
“The spring after you left some weird characters came around to see us from a government agency. These people were recruiters, looking for volunteers for a ‘supplementary training program,’ making lots of heavy hints about the black side. We were given the distinct impression that you had gone before us … and you were everybody’s idol, of course.”
“Everybody’s scapegoat, you mean.”
“That too, sometimes.” He smiled at the memory. “Anyway, we were suckers for the pitch. I was, anyway. I signed up—got into a shouting match with my mom and dad, but they finally gave in—and I went off to summer camp with a few of the others. This was in eastern Arizona, high up on the Mogollon Rim. We were there maybe three weeks. They knew we were in good shape, so they got right into the intellectual stuff. Survival. Ciphers. Demolition. Silent killing. Later I realized it was all lightweight, child’s play. An audition—a sieve, really, to catch those of us who were talented. Psychologically susceptible.”
“Who’d they catch? You and who else?”
“Nobody. Your father showed up one afternoon. He had plainclothes heavies with him, FBI maybe. I never saw him so angry; he just terrorized these self-styled tough guys who were running the place. To us kids he didn’t say much, but we could see his heart was breaking. We were on carriers back to Phoenix an hour later. That was the end of summer camp.” Blake paused. “That was the last time I saw your father. I never saw your mother again, either.”
“They’re dead. Officially. Chopper crash in Maryland.”
“Yes. Did you go to the funeral?”
“Maybe. Maybe not. That’s the year that’s missing from my memory.”
“Nobody I’ve talked to went to the funeral. We heard that—about the crash—a month, after we got home. SPARTA just fell apart, then. Next fall we were dispersed, most of us in private colleges—surrounded by people we thought of as retarded. We still had a whole lot to learn. What happened to you, nobody ever heard.”
“What did happen to me?”
Blake looked at her, his warm eyes softening. “This isn’t from experience, this is from research,” he said. “In some of the journals you’ll find that about that time, there was a program to inject self-replicating biochips into human subjects. This program was supposed to be under Navy control, because they were the biochip experts, instead of under Health or Science as you’d expect. The first subject was somebody who was supposedly clinically dead, brain-dead.”
“A neat cover story.” She laughed, but there was bitterness in her voice. “All they did was reverse cause and effect.”
He waited, but she said no more. “This subject supposedly showed remarkable improvement at first, but then became severely disturbed and had to be placed in permanent care. A private place in Colorado.”
“Biochips wasn’t all they did, Blake,” she whispered. “They had a lot to hide.”
“I’ve begun to gather that,” he said. “They did their best. Four years ago the place in Colorado burned down. Killed a dozen people. End of trail.”
“Everything you’ve told me I’ve already reconstructed for myself,” she said impatiently.
“If I hadn’t already seen you alive, I would have given up. How did you escape?”
“The doctor who was supposed to be my watchdog—his conscience must have started bothering him. He used biochips to repair the lesions they’d made. I started remembering…” She turned to him and without thinking gripped his arm, hard. “What happened during that missing year? What were they really trying to do? What did I do that scared them, made them turn me into a vegetable?”
“Maybe you learned something,” he said.
She started to speak but hesitated; his tone alerted her that she might not like what she heard. She withdrew her hand and quietly asked, “What do you suppose it was?”
“I think you learned that SPARTA was more than your father and mother claimed. The tip of a huge iceberg, an ancient iceberg.” He studied her while the station rolled in space and the bright bars of light through the grill sliced his shadowy features to ribbons. “There’s a theory. An ideal. Men and women have been burned in the service of that ideal. Others who believed in it have been praised as great philosophers. And some believers gained power and became monsters. The more I study this subject, the more connections I find, and the farther back they reach—in the 13th century they were known as adepts of the Free Spirit, the prophetae—but whatever name they used, they’ve never been eradicated. Their goal has always been godhood. Perfection in this life. Superman.”
Sparta’s mind was tingling; images danced in the half-light but flickered strobing away before she could raise them to consciousness. The peculiar vibration overcame her ordinary sight; she pressed her fingers to her closed eyelids. “My parents were psychologists, scientists,” she whispered.
“There has always been a dark side and a light side, a black side and a white side.” Patiently he waited until she opened her eyes again. “The man who ran M.I. was named Laird,” he said. “He tried to keep his involvement a secret.”
“I recognize the name.”
“Laird knew your parents for years, decades. Since before they immigrated. Maybe he knew something that would embarrass them.”
“No,” she whispered. “No, Blake, I think he seduced them with visions of an easier route to perfection.”
“You’ve remembered something new?”
She looked around, distracted and nervous. “You’ve been helpful, Blake. It’s time we got to the rest of our business.”
“Laird’s changed his name, maybe his appearance, but I think he’s still influential in the government.”
“I’ll worry about it later.”
“If he could have controlled you, he could have made himself anything he wanted.” He paused. “Maybe even a president.”
“He failed to control me. He also failed to make me perfect.”
“I think he’d like to bury the evidence of his failure.”
“I know that well enough. But that’s my problem.”
“I’ve made it mine,” he said.
“Sorry. You can’t play this game.” Her voice had regained its confidence. “Let’s get on with the game we’re already playing. Catching a thief.”
“Inspector Ellen Troy, Board of Space Control.”
The expression on Vincent Darlington’s round face wavered between disgust and disbelief—“Whatever could have…?”—and finally settled on deference to authority. He reluctantly opened the doors of the Hesperian Museum.
Sparta pocketed her badge. She was still wearing her dock
rat disguise, and at the moment she felt more like the dock rat than the cop. “I believe you know Mr. Blake Redfield of London.”
“Goodness, Mr. Redfield,” Darlington fluttered. “Oh, come in, inside, both of you. Do please excuse the frightful disarray. There was to have been a celebration…”
The place looked like a mortuary. White cloths covered lumpy mounds on long tables standing against the walls. Lush and reverent scenes in thick oils hung in ornate frames. Colored light from the glass dome lay over everything.
“Well!” Darlington hesitantly extended a plump hand to Blake. “It is … good to meet you personally at last.”
Blake shook hands firmly, while Darlington’s scandalized gaze fell to the charred sleeve of his jacket. Blake followed his glance. “Sorry, I’ve just been involved in the pressure-loss incident,” he said, “and I haven’t had time to clean up.”
“My goodness, that was terrifying. Whatever happened? It’s the sort of thing that makes one long to be back on solid ground.”
“It’s under investigation,” Sparta said. “Meanwhile it has been decided to release your property from Star Queen. I think it will be just as safe here with you.”
In the crook of his left arm Blake held a blocky package wrapped in white plastic. “Here’s the book, sir,” Blake said, holding out the package. He let the plastic fall away to reveal the pristine marbled paper of the slipcase.
Darlington’s eyes widened behind his thick round glasses and his mouth pursed with delight. He quietly took the book from Blake, gazed at it a moment, then carried it with ceremony to the display case at the head of the hall.
Darlington laid the book on top of the glass and slid the leather-covered volume from its slipcase. The gilt edges of the pages glittered in the strange, dramatic light. Darlington stroked the tan cover as gently as if it had been living skin, turning the precious object in his hands to inspect its flawless binding. Then he reverently set it down again and opened it—to the title page.