Prisoners of Tomorrow

by James P. Hogan

  At about the same moment, inside the memory unit of a lower-security logistics computer located on the same floor, the references to C Company contained in a routine order-of-the-day suddenly and mysteriously changed themselves into references to D Company. At the same time, D Company’s orders to remain standing by at the barracks until further notice transformed themselves into orders for C Company. Ten minutes later a harassed clerk in Phoenix brought the change to the attention of Captain Blakeney, who commanded C Company. Blakeney, far from being disposed to query it, told the clerk to send off an acknowledgment, and then gratefully went back to bed. Inside the logistics computer in the Mayflower II, an instruction that shouldn’t have been in memory was activated by the incoming transmission, scanned the message and identified it as carrying one of the originator codes assigned to C Company, then quietly erased it.

  CHAPTER THIRTY-SIX

  Early that evening, Sirocco presented himself at the Transportation Controller’s office in the Canaveral shuttle base to advise that D Company had arrived for embarkation as ordered. Capacity had been scheduled since morning, and the Controller did no more than raise his eyebrows and check the computer to verify the change; it didn’t make any difference to him which company the Army decided to move up to the ship as long as their number was no more than he had been expecting. An hour later the company marched off the shuttle in smart order, and after clearing the docking-bay area in Vandenberg, dispersed inconspicuously to their various destinations around the Mayflower II. Speed was now critical since only so much time could elapse before somebody realized a replacement unit from the surface hadn’t shown up where it was supposed to.

  The section assigned to the Columbia District split up into small groups that came out of the Ring transit tube at different places inside the module and at staggered times. Colman, Hanlon, and Driscoll got off with Lechat, who was dressed to obscure his appearance since he was presumably still high on Sterm’s wanted list. They rendezvoused with Carson and three others a few minutes later, then they headed via a roundabout route for the Francoise restaurant, which was situated on a public level immediately below the Government Center complex.

  All entrances into the Center itself were guarded. Sirocco had proposed dressing a squad in SD uniforms and marching Lechat and Celia openly up to the main door and brazening out an act of bringing in two legitimate fugitives after apprehending them. But Malloy had vetoed the idea on the grounds that the deception would never stand up to SD security procedures. Then Lechat had suggested a less dramatic and less risky method. As a regular customer of the Franchise for many years, he was a close friend of the manager and had spent many late nights discussing politics with the staff until way after closing. They all knew Lechat, and he was sure he could rely on them. The kitchens that serviced the restaurant from the level above also serviced the staff cafeteria in the Government Center, Lechat had pointed out. There had to be service elevators, laundry chutes, garbage ducts—something that connected through from the rear of the Franchise.

  The party arrived at the little-used connecting passage running behind the Franchise and its neighboring establishments, and the soldiers waited among the shadows of the surrounding entrances and stairways while Lechat tapped lightly on the rear door of the restaurant. After a few seconds the door opened and Lechat disappeared inside. Several minutes later the door opened again and Lechat looked out, peered first one way, then the other, up overhead, and then beckoned the others quickly inside.

  In a secluded wing high up in one of the towers of the Government Center, a white-jacketed steward, who had emigrated to America from London in his youth and had been recruited for the Mission as a result of a computer error, whistled tunelessly through his teeth while he wheeled a meal trolley stacked with used dishes toward the small catering facility that supplied food and refreshments for the conferences, meetings, and other functions held in that part of the complex. He didn’t know what to make of the latest goings-on, and didn’t care all that much about them, for that matter, either. It was all the same to him. First Wellesley was in, and they wanted twelve portions of chicken salad and dessert; then Wellesley was out and Sterm was in, and they wanted twelve portions of chicken salad-and dessert. It didn’t make any difference to him who—

  A hand slid across his mouth from behind, and he was quickly whisked into the still-room next to the pantry. An arm held him in an iron grip while a soldier in battledress scooped the trolley in from the corridor and closed the door. There were more of them in there, with a civilian. They looked mean and in no mood for fooling around.

  The hand over his mouth loosened a fraction after the door was closed. “Gawd! Wot’s goin’ on? Who—?” Somebody jabbed him in the ribs. He shut up.

  “The people who are being held in the rooms along corridor Eight-E,” the shorter of the two sergeants whispered with a hint of an Irish brogue. “You take their food in?” The steward gulped and nodded vigorously. “When is the evening meal due?”

  “Abaht ten minutes,” the steward said. “I’m supposed ter collect it next door any time nah.” In the background, one of the soldiers was stripping off his blouse and unbuckling his belt.

  “Start taking off the jacket and the vest,” the Irish sergeant ordered. “And while you’re doing it, you can tell us the routine.”

  Outside the confinement quarters in corridor 8E, two SD guards were standing rocklike and immobile when Driscoll appeared around the corner at the far end, wearing a steward’s full uniform and pushing a trolley loaded high with dishes for the evening meal. Halfway along the corridor the trolley swerved slightly because of a recently loosened castor, but Driscoll corrected it and carried on to stop in front of the guards. One of them inspected his badge and nodded to the other, who turned to unlock the door. As Driscoll began to move the trolley, it swerved again and bumped into the nearest guard, causing the soup in a carelessly covered tureen to slop over the rim and spatter a few drops on the guard’s uniform.

  “Oh, Christ!” Driscoll began fussing with a napkin to clean it off, in the process managing to trail a corner of it through the soup and brush it against the hem of the second guard’s jacket as he turned back from the door.

  Driscoll moaned miserably and started dabbing it off, but was shoved away roughly. “Get off, you clumsy asshole,” the guard growled. Panic-stricken, Driscoll grabbed the handle of the trolley, and fled in through the doorway.

  Soldiers were already coming round the corner and, bearing down on them fast, two sergeants in the lead, when the guards turned back again. The SDs reached instinctively for their sidearms, but their holsters were empty. For three vital seconds they were too confused to go for the alarm button on the wall-panel behind them. Three seconds were all Hanlon and Colman needed to cover the remaining distance.

  Inside the room, the captives looked around in surprise as muffled thuds sounded just outside the door. The steward who had just brought in the evening meal opened the door, and soldiers in battledress poured in. Wellesley gasped as he saw Lechat with them. “Paul!” he exclaimed. “Where have you been hiding? You’re the only one they didn’t pick up. What—”

  Lechat cut him off with a wave of his hand. “Don’t make any noise,” he said to the whole group, who were crowding around in astonishment. “Everything is okay.” He signaled Borftein over with another wave of his hand. Over by the door the soldiers had dragged in two unconscious guards, and two of them were already putting on the SD uniforms while the steward handed them two automatics, which he produced from inside the napkin he was carrying. “There isn’t a lot of time,” Lechat advised Wellesley and Borftein. “We have to get you downstairs and into the Communications Center. Now listen, and I’ll give you a quick rundown on the situation . . .”

  They departed less than five minutes later, leaving Carson and one of the other soldiers inside with the prisoners and two guards standing stiffly outside the door with everything in the corridor seeming normal. Hanlon took Wellesley, Borftei
n, and Lechat to a storeroom near the Communications Center where they could remain out of sight. Colman followed Driscoll to a machinery compartment on the lowermost level where an emergency bulkhead door, unguarded but sealed from the outside and protected by alarm circuits, led through to the motor room of an elevator bank in the civic offices adjoining the Government Center. Colman traced, checked, and neutralized the alarms. Then he double-checked what he had done, and nodded to Driscoll, who was waiting by the door; Driscoll opened the latches and swung the door outward while Colman held his breath. The alarms remained inactive. Sirocco was waiting on the other side with Bernard Fallows, who was wearing engineer’s coveralls and carrying a toolbox.

  “Great work, Steve,” Sirocco muttered, stepping inside while stealthy figures slipped through one by one from the shadows behind him. “How did the Amazing Driscoll go over?”

  “His best performance ever. Everything okay out there?”

  “It seems to be. How about Borftein and Wellesley?” Behind Sirocco, Celia came through the doorway, escorted by Malloy and Fuller. Stanislau was behind, carrying a field compack.

  Colman nodded. “Gone to the storeroom with Hanlon and Lechat. Everything was quiet upstairs when we left.”

  Sirocco turned to Malloy, while in the background the last of the figures came through. “Okay, you know where to go. Hanlon should be there now with the others.” Malloy nodded. “We’ll make a soldier out of you yet,” Sirocco said to Celia. “You’re doing fine. Almost there now.” Celia returned a thin smile but said nothing. She moved away with the others toward the far side of the compartment. Meanwhile Stanislau had set up the compack and was already calling up codes onto the screen. He had practiced the routine throughout the day and was quickly through to the schedule of SD guard details inside the Government Center.

  The next part was going to be the trickiest. The information obtained by Stanislau had confirmed that the outside entrances to the complex, which had already been bypassed, were the most strongly guarded, and the three inner access points to the Communications Center itself—the main foyer at the front, the rear lobby, and a side entrance used by the staff—were covered by less formidable, three-man security teams. The problem with these security teams lay not so much with the physical resistance they might offer, but with their ability to close the Communications Center’s electrically operated, armored doors and raise the alarm at the first sign of anything suspicious, which would leave Sirocco’s force shut outside with no hope of achieving their objective and facing the bleak prospect of either fighting it out or surrendering to the guard reinforcements that would show up within minutes. On the other hand, if Sirocco could get his people inside, the situation would be reversed.

  Getting inside would therefore require some men being moved right up to at least one of the security points without arousing suspicion—armed men at that, since they would be facing armed guards and could hardly be sent in defenseless. Malloy had again discouraged ideas of attempting to impersonate SDs. The only alternative came from Armley—a bluff, backed up with information manufactured by Stanislau, to the effect that regular troops were being posted to guard duties inside the complex as well as SDs, and providing reliefs from D Company. Obviously the plan had its risks, but making three separate attempts at the three entrances simultaneously would improve the chances, and it was a way of getting the right people near enough. In the end, Sirocco agreed. Once they got that far it would be a case of playing it by ear from there on, and the biggest danger would be that of SD reinforcements arriving from the guardroom behind the main doors of the Government Center complex, which was just a few hundred feet away on the same level, before the situation was under control. That was the part that Bernard Fallows had come along to handle.

  Stanislau stood back from the compack and announced that the changes were completed. Sirocco peered at the screen, checked the entries in the revised schedule that Stanislau had produced, and nodded. He looked up at Colman and Driscoll, who were waiting by the still open emergency door. “Okay, the last ball’s rolling,” he told them. “On your way. Good luck.”

  “You too,” Colman said. He and Driscoll left for the forward section of the Spindle to join Swyley, who, if all was going well, would already be organizing the men drifting in from various parts of the ship to block off the Battle Module.

  Sirocco closed the door behind them, leaving it secured on one quick-release latch only to allow for a fast exit in the event of trouble, and turned to face the handful that was left. “Let’s go,” he said.

  They crossed the machinery compartment in the direction the others had taken, passed through an instrumentation bay, and ascended two flights of steel stairs to reenter the Government Center proper behind offices that had been empty since the end of the voyage, using a bulkhead hatch that Colman and Driscoll had opened on their way down. There was no sign of the others who had gone ahead. Here the group split three ways.

  Stanislau and two others, moving carefully and making use of cover since they were now in a part of the complex that was being used, headed for the storeroom near the front foyer of the Communications Center to join Hanlon’s group, which by now should have been swollen by the arrival of Celia, Malloy, and Fuller; Sirocco took three more to where another group was assembling near the approaches to the rear lobby; and Bernard with his toolbox strolled away casually on his own toward the corridor that connected the Communications Center to the main entrance of the complex.

  Fifteen minutes later, inside an office that opened onto a passageway to the rear lobby of the Communications Center, an indignant office manager and two terrified female clerks were sitting on the floor with their hands clasped on the top of their heads, under the watchful eye of one of the soldiers who had burst in suddenly brandishing rifles and assault cannon. “What do you think you’re trying to do?” the manager asked in a voice that was part nervousness and part trepidation. “We don’t want to get mixed up in any of this.”

  “Just shut up and keep still, and you won’t,” Sirocco murmured without moving his eye from the edge of the almost-closed door. “We’re just passing through.” After a short silence Sirocco tensed suddenly. “Here they come . . . just two of them with a sergeant,” he whispered. “Get ready. There are two guys talking by the coffee dispenser. We’ll have to grab them too. Faustzman, you take care of them.” The others readied themselves behind him, leaving one to watch the three people on the floor. Outside in the passageway, the SD detail on its way to relieve the security guards at the rear lobby was almost abreast of the door.

  “Freeze!” Sirocco stepped out in front of them with his automatic drawn and Stewart beside him holding a leveled assault cannon. Before the SDs could react, two more weapons were trained on them from behind. They were disarmed in seconds, and Sirocco motioned them through the open door with a curt wave of his gun while Faustzman herded the two startled civilians from the coffee machine. Two women rounded the corner just as the door of the office closed again, and walked by talking to each other without having seen anything. Moments later Sirocco left the office again with two privates. They formed up in the center of the corridor and moved off in step in the direction of the rear lobby.

  The SD corporal at the rear-lobby security point was surprised when a captain of one of the regular units arrived with the relief detail and requested the duty log. “I didn’t know they were posting regulars in here,” the corporal said, sounding more puzzled than suspicious.

  Sirocco shrugged. “Don’t ask me. I thought it was because a lot of SDs are shipping down to Canaveral. I just do what the orders say.”

  “When was it changed, Captain?”

  “I don’t know, Corporal. Recently, I guess.”

  “I better check those orders.” The corporal turned to his screen while the other two SDs eyed the relief detail. After a few seconds the corporal raised his eyebrows. “You’re right. Oh, well, I guess it’s okay.” The other two SDs relaxed a fraction. The corporal called up th
e duty log and signed his team off. “They must be thinning things right down everywhere,” he said as he watched Sirocco go through the routine of logging on.

  “Looks like it,” Sirocco agreed. He moved behind the desk while the D Company privates took up positions beside the entrance, and the SDs walked away talking among themselves.

  A few seconds after the SDs disappeared, figures began popping from a fire exit behind the elevators on the far side of the lobby, and vanishing quickly and silently into the Communications Center.

  Meanwhile, the SD sergeant at the main foyer was being conscientious. “I don’t care what the computers say, Hanlon. This doesn’t sound right to me. I have to check it out.” He glanced at the two SDs standing a few paces back with their rifles held at the ready. “Keep an eye on ’em while I call the OOB.” Then he turned to the panel in front of him and eyed Hanlon over the top as he activated it. “Hold it right where you are, buddy.” Hanlon tensed but there was nothing he could do. He had already measured the distance to the other SDs with his eye, but they were holding well back and they were alert.

  Suddenly, from the outer entrance to the foyer behind Hanlon, a firm, authoritative voice ordered, “Stop that!” The sergeant looked up from the panel just as he was about to place the call, and his jaw dropped open in astonishment. Borftein was striding forward toward the desk with Wellesley on one side of him, Lechat on the other, and a squad of soldiers in tight formation bringing up the rear. Celia and Malloy were between them. The two SD guards glanced uncertainly at each other.

  The SD sergeant half rose from his seat. “Sir, I didn’t—I thought—”

  Borftein halted and stood upright and erect before the desk. “Whatever you thought was mistaken. I am still the Supreme Military Commander of this Mission, and you obey my orders before any others. Stand aside.”