The Long Run

by The Long Run (new ed) (mobi)

  Seven shots left in the needler.

  Brissois arrived along with the Elite Vance had requested, five men and a woman, all marked with the stiff skin and gleaming eyes that were the badge of their distance from normal humanity. They carried sonic stunners powerful enough to drop anyone but an Elite cyborg in his tracks. They arrayed themselves in a semicircle facing the door to the infirmary, three of them before the door, and two of them on either side.

  Vance stood well back from the door, restraining Melissa and Colonel Brissois with a quiet gesture. A crowd of PKF had gathered in the cross corridors, watching. "Command," said Mohammed Vance, "unlock on my voice print. This is Commissionaire Mohammed Vance of the PKF Elite. Verify and implement."

  The door bolts snapped free and the infirmary door curled out of the way. There was a buzzing of sonic rifles and then quiet and the Elite went through in a blur of motion that Melissa simply could not follow, first the three before the door, then the two flanking the doorway.

  The buzzing of their sonic rifles came again, very loud, and then there was silence again. The female Elite called out, "Commissionaire!"

  Mohammed Vance moved forward slowly, into the infirmary. The bed in which Trent had been lying had been knocked halfway across the infirmary. Vance turned slowly, surveying the infirmary with growing rage. There was nowhere to hide in the small space.

  "Sir? Commissionaire," said the female Elite, "there's no one here."

  "This is not possible." The laser in Vance's fist lit, glowed cherry red; he dropped to the floor and looked beneath the row of beds, pushed himself one-handed back to his feet and turned to Colonel Brissois. His voice shook with the effort of keeping a clamp on his temper. "Call a general alert. I want guards at every airlock leading out of the base." Melissa du Bois was staring at Vance in something like shock; her features were ashen. Vance glanced at her, turned back to Brissois. The words were like acid in his mouth. "Trent is free within your base."

  It grew noticeably cooler as Trent moved lower into the base.

  There was only one level of buildings above ground; the balance of the base, four levels, was beneath ground. The LINK transputers were on the bottom level. Trent avoided the column at the geometric center of the base that held the maglev lifts, bounced down a series of ramps so quickly that several of the PKF whom he passed looked at him curiously. He had reached Level Five, where the LINK Center was located, and was moving down a long, nearly empty passageway with an armed guard at the far end, when the voice blared:

  "ALERT, ALERT!"

  The few Peaceforcers around Trent jumped in surprise; one of them literally came up off the floor, clawing for footing. Trent did not slow down, kept walking without hurry toward the lone armed Peaceforcer.

  "ALIEN IN THE INSTALLATION, REPEAT, UNAUTHORIZED ALIEN IN THE INSTALLATION; ALL PERSONNEL RETREAT TO SECURED AREAS. LOCKDOWN IN EFFECT, REPEAT, LOCKDOWN IN EFFECT. PERSONNEL IN CORRIDORS WILL BE SHOT WITHOUT WARNING. REPEAT, LOCKDOWN IN EFFECT."

  The guard was a weary-looking older Peaceforcer in his thirties, standing in a loose imitation of attention next to the entrance to the LINK Center. There was an anesthetic needler holstered at his waist, similar to the weapon Trent carried but with a far larger magazine. He did not seem particularly alarmed by either the alert just broadcast, or by Trent's approach; when Trent neared to within two meters he held up a lanky arm, palm outward, and said, "Name, please?" The guard's left hand rested on the butt of the needler.

  "Have you ever seen anything like this before?" Trent asked the man. He held up the tiny needler tucked in the palm of his hand; the Peaceforcer's eyes flickered down to look, and Trent shot him in the chest. "No?" Trent moved in quickly, grabbed the Peaceforcer as he sagged and pressed the guard's hand against the pressure pad controlling the door.

  There was an instant's pause before the door curled open.

  Trent knelt, took the needler from the unconscious guard's holster. Three Peaceforcers were standing in the corridor watching what had just happened; Trent called out to them, "Heart attack! I think he's had a heart attack!" He steadied himself on one knee in a marksman's pose, and the Peaceforcers turned to run as they realized at last what was happening.

  He flipped the switch on the side of the needler to full auto and fired, held the trigger down and sprayed the corridor with anaesthetic slivers. Two of the Peaceforcers jerked and went down instantly; the other hit the ramp at the end of the corridor, moving up, and Trent thought he had missed. A ricochet must have caught him; a moment later the man slid back down the ramp, tumbling gently head over heels in the mild Lunar gravity. Trent had a wild desire to thank the unconscious Peaceforcers for cooperating so perfectly.

  The door was trying to close; Trent held it open with one hand, watched the corridor for just a second, then turned and went through, into the core of the Farside DataWatch.

  The webdancer flickered through every level of the base. Vance and Melissa, Colonel Brissois and an aide in a scalesuit, were clustered in the small office on Level Two, down the hall from the infirmary, watching as scenes from throughout the base were displayed inside the terminal's holofield. The webdancer sat before the terminal with his eyes closed, physically unconnected to the terminal; Melissa supposed he possessed a radio packet inskin. The squad of PKF Elite waited patiently in the corridor outside; occasional webdancers ran through the corridors to their designated lockdown positions.

  An image inside the field froze motionless. The holocams showed the still form of a man on Level Five, sprawled at the base of a ramp connecting Levels Four and Five. The image held for a second, was replaced by a long shot of that corridor showing four fallen officers.

  "Level Five," said Brissois swiftly.

  Vance stood motionless as the enormity of his mistake crashed in upon him. "I am a fool. He's not an ideolog, he's a thief. What else would he be here for?" He turned to Colonel Brissois. "He's come to take the LINK."

  The woman stared at Vance. "That's not possible. He can't do it."

  "I think he can." Vance glanced once more at the terminal, at the image of the felled PKF.

  "Perhaps nobody else can do it," Melissa whispered. "He can, or thinks he can, or he would not have come."

  Vance stared at du Bois, the nearly immobile cyborg features somehow animated with a vast and impossible rage, and then turned back to Brissois. "What, exactly, is controlled by the LINK transputers?"

  "In total, I--I am not sure." Brissois turned to her aide. "Captain Clotilde!"

  "Pretty much--everything," the man said slowly.

  Vance grabbed the Captain by the collar of his scalesuit. "You're suited up. The LINK transputers control the base's air?" The man nodded, plainly terrified. "Its lights?"

  "Yes, sir."

  The collar of the scalesuit was deforming where Vance's hand curled around its edge. "What of the mass driver?"

  Clotilde's eyes were impossibly wide, all whites. "That too."

  Vance stared at the man for an instant, then at Brissois. "You incredible fools." Vance tossed the captain aside; he struck the wall with an audible thud. Vance turned to Melissa du Bois and snapped, "Lock down the mass driver's launch mechanism. Destroy it if you must. Tell Captain Fouché to lift his semiballistic out of Verne crater right now." He did not wait for Melissa's response; he pushed his way through the crowd around him, grabbed a sonic rifle from one of the PKF Elite waiting in the corridor outside, and with incredibly long, bounding strides, ran for the ramps.

  Trent walked forward into a large, dimly lit area. The room was distinctly cold; a great oval place, with holo displays arrayed along the Center's walls. There were six workstations, facing away from the entrance and toward the walls of the room, that were as completely appointed as anything Trent had ever seen: MRI full sensables, tracesets, attachments for those webdancers with socketed inskins. Through his own inskin Trent felt the almost palpable presence of a bewildering storm of radio packet data. The holo displays held detailed maps of Luna, charts s
howing the current positions of the comsats and Orbital Eyes, near-space maps showing transient traffic--SpaceFarer ships, PKF craft, Space Force.

  At the very midpoint of the room, so that the webdancers worked with their backs to it, was a sphere a hundred and fifty centimeters across. The LINK transputers, some twenty-five billion tiny silver processors linked together inside a restraining superconductor mesh. The sphere rested upon block after block of jet black RTS RAM. Despite the fact that there was no way he could steal it Trent could not prevent himself from making a swift estimate; between six and seven hundred terabytes, nearly four and a half million CU worth of hot RAM alone. More than a man could carry.

  Four of the workstations were occupied by uniformed Peaceforcers; three of the webdancers were lost inside the Crystal Wind, and did not notice Trent as he came forward. The fourth, a woman whose features Trent could not make out clearly in the dim lighting, stripped off a traceset and rose from her seat at Trent's approach.

  "What's going on? What's the alarm for?" Her eyes fixed on the needler Trent carried, and she drew in a deep breath as though to scream or shout a warning. Trent flipped the switch on the needler to single-shot; the breath came out in a surprised whoosh as Trent shot her.

  Trent could not get over the way people who were shot in Lunar gravity kept reacting; the long, comically slow tumble to the ground, as though they were bad sensable extras, overacting during the one moment the holocams were on them. "Fall down," Trent observed. He could feel his lips twisted into an impossibly wide grin. "Go boom." The three who had remained at their workstations through the alarm never knew what happened; Trent put a single anesthetic sliver into the back of each one's neck.

  He went back to the LINK transputers, stood at the edge of the small rail surrounding the superconductor mesh-covered collection of silver spheres.

  Trent said softly, "Hello, Watchdog."

  There was no verbal response; Trent was aware of sudden silence on the radio packet frequencies, a vibrant emptiness. "The answer to your question," Trent said, "is yes. I am a Player."

  No response.

  Trent whispered, "And the best one, too. Say your prayers, sucker."

  He closed his eyes and went Inside.

  Vance hit the bottom of the ramp on Level Two. The corridors were almost completely empty now, all those PKF who were not part of the base's Security force at or on their way to their assigned lockdown posts.

  He ran for the ramp to Level Three, gaining speed as he moved: a human juggernaut.

  There was at first a great emptiness.

  Then a pattern, a pulse, a roar.

  He floated disembodied among the fastest, most powerful processors he had ever encountered. He made no attempt to attach any of the processors, but simply stood and observed. Nearly five percent of the full computing power of the Lunar InfoNet was concentrated in that one room. Every significant part of the U.N. Lunar InfoNet was connected to it.

  Help files; Trent touched them and resources spilled into his awareness. The monitor and debugging tools used by the Lunar DataWatch to observe Watchdog, to make certain that no trace of true self-awareness crept into it. The physical world: a tiny fraction of the LINK transputers oversaw the base's maintenance, security, atmosphere control. Another tiny fraction controlled the catapult.

  A hurricane of images passed before Trent's awareness: long stretches of quiet corridor, the comsat image of a PKF semiballistic hopper taking off from Jules Verne crater. The same comsat showed a pair of PKF in pressure suits, moving across the regolith toward the Verne catapult, moving with such speed that they had to be Elite.

  An image frozen in time: Mohammed Vance moving at speeds no normal human could have matched, two steps down the Level Three ramp, sonic rifle clutched in one hand, laser glowing scarlet in his fist. Full Realtime seconds ticked by as Trent felt himself stretching, pulling apart. He was distinctly aware of the feel of the air from the ventilators stirring his hair, of its touch upon the skin of his face. Vance was three steps down the ramp now, coming for Trent.

  There was too much to do, far more than any human could accomplish in the time before Mohammed Vance reached the LINK Center, to kill Trent or capture him.

  There was no time.

  Trent did not wait for his slow biological component to figure things out; he cut his flesh, the sluggish protein soup, out of the connection. There was a faint echo, the flavor of approval, from the code that had once called itself Johnny Johnny.

  He moved deeper into the darkness of the massed processors, to where Watchdog waited, observing.

  Trent said, "Let's dance."

  Melissa du Bois stood before her terminal, eyes closed, holding the traceset to her head with both hands, trying to ignore the voices around her. The man Vance had thrown against the wall, Captain Clotilde, was complaining of blurry vision, saying that he wanted to see Doctor Grissom.

  "East airlock, south airlock, west airlock, north," Melissa murmured as reports came in. "Covered." She opened her eyes as the webdancer whom she had evicted from the terminal was helping Clotilde to his feet. "He stays here," she said flatly. "I need him."

  Clotilde attempted to focus on her. "Who is she?"

  Melissa turned to the man. "I have four airlocks covered. What's left?"

  Clotilde glanced around the room. Colonel Brissois said sharply, "Answer her."

  "The garage," he said slowly. "There is a large airlock that services the garage, forty meters from the south airlock."

  "You," said Melissa sharply, to the woman just outside the small office, the only Elite left in the corridor outside. "You know this airlock?"

  The woman said simply, "I do."

  "Go."

  The Elite saluted and vanished, and Melissa was turning back to Brissois when the paint flickered and failed. There was an instant of darkness and then the emergency lights came up, glowing dimly.

  Darkness, and then sirens; in the back of his mind Mohammed Vance recognized the klaxon sound that warned of a death pressure breach.

  He did not slow down.

  Trent fought wildly, enjoying himself hugely. In the first instants he had known himself outmatched at the level of sheer processor power; his protein component had processor power approximately equivalent to that of the LINK transputers, but was far too slow to be of use. The only thing that saved him in those first instants was the fashion in which Watchdog had been designed to control resources, dynamically accessing and releasing storage and processors as needed to reduce contention. It would have been easy enough for Watchdog to simply set every processor in the LINK transputers to some meaningless task and artificially assign a high priority to those tasks so that Trent would be denied access to them; but Watchdog was coded so that it could not squander resources in such a fashion. Early in the fight, in the first fraction of a second, Trent seized control of the base's emergency support systems, glanced through the security holocams to find Mohammed Vance and toggled a breach alarm for Level Four. Barriers slid into place at all passageways linking Level Four to Levels Three or Five.

  Trent did not know whether he had trapped Vance or not, and had no time to waste finding out; Watchdog was engaged in damage control, shutting down huge chunks of the Lunar InfoNet so that it might cease monitoring them and liberate processor power for use in the battle against Trent. Each processor in the vast assembly of the LINK transputers had dedicated RAM both on-chip and as external resources; it made taking out any one processor difficult.

  Trent fired salvo after salvo of memory scrambling viruses into the territory controlled by Watchdog.

  The webdancer jerked and went rigid. "Oh, God. Oh, no." Melissa could barely hear the voice over the sound of the klaxons. "That bastard." He looked around wildly, as though trying to refuse the information being brought to him by his inskin. "He brought it down."

  "Watchdog?" said Brissois sharply. "He's taken down Watchdog?"

  "No." Melissa felt a sudden flash of relief and the webdancer continued
without pause: "The whole fucking InfoNet."

  Across United Nations Luna, both nearside and farside, terminals and tracesets died. There was terror and confusion, as normal users and PKF webdancers alike tried to figure out what was happening, knowing for sure only that something was terribly wrong. The terminals came back up, operating from local resources; the vast organization of lasercable that linked the world together did not.

  Alone and afraid, unable to communicate, unable to find out what was happening, people waited.

  The Network was down.

  Moving faster than any human being, as fast as an Elite cyborg could, Mohammed Vance barely had time to notice the smooth, floor-to-ceiling barrier at the bottom of the ramp leading to Level Five.

  Suddenly he understood the reason behind the breach alarms going off: Trent had set off a breach alarm, thus sealing Level Five off from the upper levels. Vance had a bare moment to admire the elegance of the solution and then he struck the barrier at over fifty kilometers an hour.

  Melissa surprised herself by how calmly she was taking it all, by how rationally she was evaluating the situation. She stripped down her maser, checked the charge cartridge; it would not have surprised her to find it missing.

  It was there.

  In the dim light from the emergency power, she looked up again to find Colonel Brissois watching her. The older woman said, "What are you doing?"

  "Heading up to Level One. He won't get past Commissionaire Vance on the ramps; that leaves the maglev." Melissa turned the charge cartridge over in her hands once, feeling the smooth metal surface of the flattened cylinder.

  Colonel Brissois said slowly, "You are the Commissionaire's personal assistant, not trained in Lunar-gravity security work, I believe?"

  "True." Melissa jacked the power charge back into the base of the maser.

  Colonel Brissois said, "I think you should stay here. There are security squads in the corridors, and they won't know you."