Earthweb

by Marc Stiegler

  Samuels smiled in sympathy as he replied to her real concern. "Of course, Jessica. It is very lonely, working on this all alone. Morgan, of course, is in constant communication with the Angels, but for you, the problem is even harder, at least in that respect."

  "Thanks." Jessica stepped back through the hatch of her cocoon. Her head still hurt, but she definitely felt better.

  * * *

  The Dealer watched the sloping walls of the Alabaster Hall slide by. His touchscreen was mostly filled with the view from a camera affixed to Roni Shatzski's frame. The scene commanded the Dealer's most complete attention: now that he was into the assault for hard money, it all seemed much more real.

  He had never before understood why they called the first part of the path the Alabaster Hall, but now, as he stood like speck of dust on its floor, it was obvious. The first twelve kilometers of hallway from the docking bay weren't really halls in the same sense as the corridors deeper inside the ship. It was more of a tunnel through the ship's armor. Consequently, just as the armored hull of the ship looked like alabaster, so did the walls of the tunnel. The builders must have constructed the interior of the ship out of a more forgiving, more workable material. That would explain the sandstone appearance of the halls deeper inside Shiva.

  Though he sat in impassive silence, the Dealer was almost as charged as the Angels. This was his big chance. He had to be there, totally focused, because he couldn't tell when the Angels might run into a requirement for his expertise. He had to be fully informed on the situation the moment opportunity arose, lest someone else beat him to the punch. Meanwhile, he'd blanketed the Earth Defense 'castpoints and prizeboards with detectors. Anytime anyone posted a new prize or forecast, his detectors awoke—but they didn't just pass the alert on to him. The Dealer had set filters on the detectors, to ensure that he only received an alert if the new prize or forecast were something that might interest him.

  Of course, he'd set the filters to be "weak." So if any doubt existed as to his interest in a new event, his filters passed the alert to him. Consequently he could be confident that he didn't miss the great opportunity, whatever it might be . . . but it also meant that he was personally screening a fair number of postings. It was frustrating to see so much money, so many possibilities, just flowing by, but he bided his time, waiting for the chance that, like the skytruck for Everest, he alone could fulfill.

  And he watched the action. Though he had envied the Angels their beautiful, expensive equipment when he was in America, the feeling had fled. Studying the immensity of the enemy starship from the safety of his apartment, he wished that somehow the Angels could have more and better equipment. Marvelous as the machinery had seemed, now it looked clumsy and forlorn. He swallowed hard, realizing that if that frail equipment failed too soon, the prizeboards would shut down prematurely, and his chance might never come. He hoped desperately for the Angels' survival.

  * * *

  CJ swerved her bike from the right-hand wall to the center of the hall, coming up adjacent to Lars. Lars smiled, tossed her a sapphire rod, and reached back into his cargo trailer for the next one. They used sapphire for these blocking rods because it was harder than any comparable metal—a necessity for jamming the monster airlock doors.

  While CJ made the pickup, Axel accelerated to leapfrog in front of her, his rod at the ready. On the left-hand wall, Roni and Akira played essentially the same game, practiced to perfection in the last month.

  The blast shields of the hall were half a kilometer thick, spaced half a kilometer apart. For each shield that slid back into the left side of the hall, the next one slid into the right. On the side of the hall that a shield slid across to, there was a shallow recess, perhaps a meter deep: the shield extended into that recess to lock into place.

  But if, after the Angels were through, the shield closed all the way into position, it would snap the fiber-optic cable trailing out to the comm lasers. To prevent this disaster, each blast shield had to be jammed open. So the Angels dropped the sapphire rods, each slightly more than a meter long, into the recesses, wedging the blast shield open. CJ looked over her shoulder as the shield they'd just passed slid across, then froze open the few millimeters required. She smiled in satisfaction.

  Hell's bells, this damn ship was huge. "Morgan, there's a really big problem with all the simulations."

  "Which particular big problem are you referring to?" Morgan's voice came to her from half a million miles away, several seconds later.

  "All those tenth-scale models just don't prepare you for the size of this thing."

  "The size of Shiva won't kill you, CJ. The robots will."

  He was right, more or less.

  Morgan's next message came through with the slight echo, the sense of loudness, that indicated the message was being broadcast to all the Angels. "Okay, folks, you're past the last blast shield. Half a klick ahead there's just an airlock cover, like the one that closes over the docking bay. When that cover slides open, you'll be in contact." CJ heard Morgan cluck his tongue across time and space. CJ perked up. Morgan was uncertain about something. But of all the parts of an Angel assault, this part was most standardized.

  What change in SOP could Morgan be considering?

  * * *

  No! a voice screamed in Morgan's head. Get her out of there!

  But no one listened, least of all Morgan himself. It was too late to extract CJ from Shiva, even if she would let him. Though they had wedged the blast shields wide enough for the hair-thin cabling to go through, even the tiny CJ could not squeeze through those gaps. Morgan had a glimmer of a plan for getting her out, but the shortest path to his great hope lay through Shiva's control room.

  As he watched her roll through the final shield, a single thought took hold of his mind. Shake his head as he might, he could not throw the realization aside: only one more wall, hardly a meter thick, separated his magnificent CJ from Shiva's first deadly reception committee. His heart started pounding hard and erratically. He was glad no one had him wired up like the Angels, or they'd have paramedics standing in the hall for him, which was the last distraction he needed. Via the vidcams that watched him as well as the Angels, the whole world could see the tension lines cross his forehead, but at least his heartbeat and adrenaline levels were private affairs.

  He stared at the pristine smoothness of the airlock cover, coming up so fast. Soon it would open, and something terrible would face his team. He clenched his fists; his fingernails dug into the palms of his hands. He desperately wanted to know what, and how many, and—

  A soft chime sounded as his detectors sniffed a new offering on the Angels' realtime prizeboard. Somebody wanted one of the Angels to throw a rod against the cover while another Angel listened on the floor. The prize-holders were willing to pay Earth Defense a thousand dollars to do so.

  The thousand dollars was an infinitesimal handful of change for the Earth Defense budget, of course, but you'd only make such a serious offer if you could get some serious insight from it. And whoever offered the prize claimed they could glean the insight that struck to the core of Morgan's most desperate concern—they thought they could tell him what lay beyond the cover.

  Could they really do it? The offerer's brand had links to past successes; Morgan's forecast-assessment team traced the links and found a solid reputation.

  There was only one way to find out if the anonymous someone, somewhere on the Web, could answer his prayers. He clucked his tongue again as he thought about it.

  * * *

  Along with CJ and several billion other participants, Selpha listened as Morgan pondered the prize she had offered. She allowed herself a small smile; she was pretty sure she knew what would follow.

  It was delightful to have the resources to offer Earth Defense and the Angels a prize to gather information for her and Peter. It made a big difference in their ability to make good forecasts.

  The idea had been born in her mind as Peter listened dreamily to the sapphire rods clat
ter into the blast shield recesses. He was smiling as he listened. "So pure and clean, I can hear for kilometers," he said with a sense of rapture.

  Since learning of Peter's gift, Selpha had studied acoustics intently. And when he said that, she suddenly put several different little facts together.

  Sapphire was not only an exceptionally hard material, harder even than ceramic armor, it was also one of the most acoustically perfect materials known to man. Float a cylinder of sapphire in a vacuum, tap it gently, and it will ring for days. Selpha could not have designed a more ideal sensing device for her son.

  And Shiva's alabaster armor, while not as acoustically pure as a sapphire crystal, was nonetheless a "clean" material. Quite possibly, Peter was not exaggerating when he said he could hear for kilometers. So if they threw one of the rods against the last alabaster wall, producing a sharp sound, Peter might be able to figure out what lay beyond. And since the Angels consistently met the first enemy resistance there, the information could be tremendously valuable.

  * * *

  CJ held her breath as Morgan spoke, though the pause hurt her bicycling rhythm; she wanted to make sure she missed no part of the order. "Lars, grab one of your spare rods. When I say 'throw,' pitch it with full force against that last wall. Akira, when Lars throws, I want you to hit the deck and listen to the sound through the floor. Or rather, I want you to press your microphone to the floor. Got it?"

  "Got it," Lars and Akira said in unison.

  "Good."

  A minute passed, and CJ saw the last wall looming in front of them. In just a second it would start to open, as it sensed the approach of whomever had opened the docking bay door. Morgan yelled, "Throw!" and Lars' rod hit the wall just before it started to slide.

  * * *

  Selpha watched as Lars threw the rod. She watched Peter's expression as the rod clanged against the shield. Peter nodded his head. "There are a lot of them, Mom." Selpha was already punching in a new forecast for the Earth Defense 'castpoint as he described what he had heard.

  * * *

  Mercedes paced back and forth in front of her wallscreen. She was glad she had been firm with Reggie, refusing to work in his penthouse or to allow him to join her here. She hated the idea of him seeing her in this agitated state.

  The swift race down the Alabaster Hall lent very few opportunities for interesting forecasts: they already knew how many blast shields there were, because Angel One had crossed through them all less than a month earlier. And when that last portal opened, the action would follow too fast and thick for even the Angel Controller to make a difference, much less the 'castpoints—the Angels would have to rely on their own instincts in the heat of battle. So there wasn't really any chance she would have anything to do in this phase of the assault, but—

  Blake Gosling, the head of the Earth Defense-endorsed Forecast Spec team, appeared in a corner window of the screen. He smiled. "You're on, Mercedes. Check this out." Another window appeared on her screen, with a forecast sketch. The sketch predicted that there were between twenty and twenty-five robots at the entrance to the hall, over half of them were minitanks, and there were no Destroyers.

  Mercedes whistled. "White-hot," she said.

  "Very," Blake replied. "Hurry," he said as he shut down his feed.

  The forecast sketch had already been posted to the 'castpoint, and the person who'd submitted the 'cast had already planted fifty thousand dollars on the forecast's correctness. Mercedes stamped the sketch with her brand, and all around the world trading on the new forecast began, even as Mercedes said, "Trillian, work mode."

  When her central server, Trillian, went into work mode, the big window of the scene in Shiva shut down. Four tamperproof vidcams around the room went into operation, recording her every action.

  In the "sketch" format generally used for forecast submission, the 'cast was easy to understand but difficult to quantify for judgment. Consequently, the sketch contained plenty of room for heated argument about whether the forecast had been right or wrong. In the end you could force resolution with an arbiter, but that was expensive and wasteful. It was much better to write a precise specification, with little ambiguity, as part of the forecast, and judge right/wrong based on the spec.

  For the realtime Angel forecasts there wasn't always enough time to complete the spec before the forecast became history. So instead of insisting that the spec be complete before trading began, they posted the brand of the person who would write the spec. Professional forecasters could then follow the links on the brand to see how this particular spec writer had quantified forecasts in the past. They could get a feeling for how this 'cast would be quantified even as trading proceeded. Actually, real professionals would read the histories of all the brands in the endorsed Forecast Spec team before the assault began. Mercedes was already famous in large parts of the world, just by being a part of the team.

  Though this forecast would be resolved very, very quickly, it was also pretty easy to transform into a spec. Her hands were shaking as she finished her first draft. She stopped and forced herself to take her time. Aside from her summer jobs, small subcontracts from Blake and associates, this spec would be her first professional work. She needed to make it good. Out of the corner of her eye she noticed that the trading on the 'cast had reached a furious intensity. She forced herself to look away, back at the spec.

  * * *

  MacBride watched the buying on the forecast with awe and terror. Awe, because someone had made a remarkably detailed prediction of what they faced beyond that last airlock. Terror, because it was the biggest enemy force ever assembled at the end of the Alabaster Hall.

  Morgan remembered coming to the end of this hall in Shiva I. He and his friends had been ready for anything . . . well, as ready as they could be with little more than their bare knuckles for fighting. Morgan had correctly surmised that, to get into Shiva's docking bay, you had to go without metal, without anything that could be spotted by a simple magnetic detector. So they'd left their guns and most of their knives at home—

  Anyway, at the end of the hall, they'd run into a handful of repair mechs. The mechs' sole interest had probably been in repairing the damage the invaders had done to the outer airlock to force entry. It had been so much easier then—

  The odds on the opposing-strength forecast firmed up. The 'cast was too detailed and too strongly supported for Morgan to ignore it. Normally the Angels just rushed the robots at the end of the hall, but this time they had to use a different strategy.

  The lock was opening! He silently, swiftly blessed the person who had made the 'cast, whoever it was, for averting disaster. Then he barked out the orders that he hoped could save the team.

  * * *

  The airlock cover started moving. CJ gripped her spike more tightly and started to sprint.

  "Freeze." CJ heard Morgan's voice reach its most quiet, most authoritative form. She skidded to a halt, the last to succeed in obeying the order.

  "Unfreeze. Expect twelve Mark II minitanks and eleven roboguards. Barricade now, left side."

  Twelve minitanks! She couldn't believe it. But if it were true, they were in deep shit. Already.

  Lars wheeled the cargo trailer into position as the center of the barricade. Axel popped the 40mm pellet launcher into its stand on the top of the trailer. CJ waved Roni to the far right side, to outflank the enemy as they charged the barricade.

  Morgan's voice continued. "Full fire." They wouldn't try to use the spikes against this massive opposition; instead they'd use up ammo at a disastrous rate. But the ammo wouldn't do them any good if they were dead.

  Earlier, the blast shields had opened far too slowly for CJ's tastes. She had wanted them to pop wide so she could rush through. Now this door opened at the same speed, yet it felt as though it opened far too fast.

  The door slid from left to right, from the barricade toward Roni. Soon the opening was wide enough for a roboguard to come through. Sure enough, the first enemy robot ran toward them on
its two legs, its armored breast plate shining, its arms reaching out to kill.

  * * *

  "Viktor, Viktor!" Lou half-screamed at his friend through the touchscreen. "You having a heart attack?! Talk to me!"

  Viktor's dropped his hands away from his face, and Lou was shocked at the sight. Viktor's bloodshot eyes looked back at him in forlorn apology.

  "Viktor, there's a damn army on the far side of that blast shield. We need to design a minefield for them." Lou thought about using the clever trick they'd developed earlier for dropping a section of the ceiling, but the alabaster armor now hanging over the Angels' heads was too tough for that.

  Viktor choked out, "You help them on this one. I'll be back in a few minutes."

  Lou had no idea what was wrong with the old fool, but the Angels didn't have time for it. Lou started working out a plan. He felt half-crippled without his friend by his side, but hell, he'd worked alone for twenty years when he was a kid. And then he had been fighting against Viktor. He could do it again.

  The minitanks would be the problem here, particularly the Mark IIs, which were almost impossible to kill even with the 40mm ammo. The pistols were actually more effective against the Mark IIs–the pellets ricocheted off the floor more reliably, giving you a chance to hit the vulnerable underbelly. Mines were the right answer.