Burleigh wasn't convinced. “You think that robot had the wit to work all this out? AIs aren't that good, are they?”
“Maybe not. But what if it had instructions? What if someone foresaw what happened and told the robot how to react?”
Freymann stood up, too, and walked quickly across the room. “Shit,” she said, softly.
“What?”
“Rik, you know what this virus is supposed to do, right? Activate the credulity nexus, turn people into gullible, credulous types. The kind of people who believe in UFOs and crazy religions...”
Rik finished it for her. “And conspiracy theories. Yeah, I know, but Fariba, this isn't crazy.”
“Maybe you can't tell any more. Maybe none of us can.”
Rik couldn't argue with that, so he didn't even try. He just pushed on. “To go back to your other question, what else could the bot do? It could have left the virus for the lieutenant here to collect. He'd be forced to hand it over to his superiors. They'd hand it over to some Earth agency or another – the CIA, maybe. Sooner or later, it would be in the hands of someone Cordell could get to. After that, it would just be a matter of fixing a price, and he'd have it back again.
“So if it's a stupid move to release the virus here, why did the bot do it? What does Cordell get by infecting Heinlein?”
Burleigh answered him. “They close the place down, like you said. Declare a quarantine. But Cordell's hoping that someone manages to sneak out.”
Rik shook his head. “The only people who are more scared of a general outbreak than I am are the uploads at Omega Point. What would they do if a quarantine was declared here? What would they feel they had no choice but to do?”
“Nuke us from space,” said Freymann.
“Nuke us from space,” Rik agreed, feeling a grim satisfaction that he'd brought at least Fariba to that point. “Then what? Why would Cordell want the uploads to nuke Heinlein? What does he gain?”
Freymann had lost her sad, sceptical look and was clearly beginning to see where all this was leading. “He hates the uploads. He thinks they should be wiped out. To him, they're all soulless monsters.”
“And business rivals,” said Burleigh.
“His biggest rivals in any number of industries,” said Rik.
“So he tricks them into nuking Heinlein,” said Freymann. “He forces them to become mass murderers, to protect themselves, and then gets to point the finger at them and say, “Look at what they did. Didn't I tell you how evil they were all along?”
Burleigh joined in too. “People would be outraged. No-one on Earth really likes them anyway. Most people hate the fact uploads can still own wealth. The Omega Point guys would be branded war criminals. Legislation would be passed to confiscate their property. The UN would be asked to arrest them and bring them to The Hague for trial. It would be the end of them.”
Rik looked at Freymann and Burleigh. From their appalled expressions, he was sure they were with him. “Look, maybe this is just the virus talking, but Lanham's ship is up there right now. He must have realised this was a possibility. That's why The Phenomenon of Man took off as soon as we disembarked. That's why it's sitting up there in a synchronous orbit.
“We need to get out of here. We need to get up to the ship and stop it from doing whatever Lanham's got planned. And we'd better get moving, because the trigger is probably the city authorities declaring the quarantine.”
“But...” Freymann couldn't seem to bring herself to say it.
“But we're infected, and we'll spread it to anyone we meet,” said Burleigh.
Rik shook his head. “No, we're not.”
“What?”
“I don't know what was in those phials but it wasn't a virus. My guess is it was plain water.”
“Water?”
He turned to Burleigh. He knew Freymann would do what he asked by now. It was Burleigh he needed to trust him. “Lieutenant, we're all the victims of a massive hoax. Newton Cordell has been pushing us around the board like pieces in a game. Me especially! And it's time we started acting for ourselves.”
At least the lieutenant was still listening.
“I'll explain everything once we're underway, but right now, we need to get moving. Lanham's ship is waiting in space to destroy Heinlein. We need to get up there and stop it, and you are the only person I know who can help me do that. You've got access to a ship, right? You can get us onto one of those UNPF patrol ships.”
Burleigh showed no sign of agreeing or disagreeing. He just frowned at Rik, looking as if he still needed convincing.
“Well, let's go get it! Any minute now, the city administration will declare a full-blown quarantine, and then Lanham's people will act. I don't want to just stand here in my pyjamas, waiting for a bomb to drop through the ceiling.”
Burleigh still didn't show any sign of moving. Rik felt his anger rising.
“I thought you were supposed to be the Sheriff, Burleigh. I thought you were the law around here. These are your people, man! If you ask me, Heinlein's a damned sewer, built on a cesspit. A couple of good nukes is just what the place needs. But there are people here that I care about. Including me! And, with you or without you, I'm going to do something about it.”
He stood squarely in front of the lieutenant, glaring down at him. “Are you going to try and stop me?”
Slowly, Burleigh got to his feet. He and Rik were standing so close that their foreheads almost touched. Burleigh's men, who had been watching anxiously, now got to their feet too, ready to come to their lieutenant's aid. Burleigh met Rik's angry glare with a scowl of his own.
Quietly, he said, “Russo, take two men and get our clothes and weapons. We don't want to be running about the town in our PJs looking like a bunch of space ninjas, do we, now? Spivey, is your pilot's license good for a Mark IV Interceptor?”
A voice behind him said, “No, sir.”
Burleigh didn't even blink. “Well, we'll just have to hope you're a fast learner. Are you a fast learner, boy?”
“Yes, sir!”
“Then let's get out of this chicken coop and save the good citizens of Heinlein from the bad guys.”
Chapter 39
Fariba Freymann watched the shabby streets of Heinlein sliding slowly by. Rik and Burleigh sat opposite her in the little police transport pod. The rest of Burleigh's squad were in a larger pod behind them. She had complained at first about taking the ridiculous little electric cart when they were on a mission to save the city, but Rik and Burleigh had both insisted it was the fastest – indeed, the only – way to get around Heinlein, emergency or not.
A tense silence had fallen on the group as each of them studied their own thoughts.
“I – I don't know where to go.” That had been Maria, infuriatingly helpless, as Freymann had ushered her out of The Harsh Mistress and into the alley at the back. Freymann had badly wanted to get back inside to help Rik, but his ex couldn't be left on her own to wander the streets. If Cordell's people found her again – or Lanham's – she could be used against them.
“Just go straight down there.” She pointed along the alley in a direction she picked at random. The curved walls of the lava tube were rough and grimy on one side of the narrow space, and the backs of shops and apartments were rough and grimy on the other. The ground was bare regolith. The tube walls had been sprayed with ceramic foam insulation – more regolith, mixed with a polymer resin and aerated. It made Freymann shiver to think of how cold the lunar rock would be at the other side of that barrier. “When you can, cut through to the street and catch a pod. Don't talk to anyone. Don't draw attention to yourself. Tell the pod to take you to police HQ and then turn yourself in. You'll be safe.”
Whether she would or not, Freymann had no idea, but at least Maria would be out of play, and that's all she cared about right then.
Maria looked scared and overwhelmed by what was happening. Freymann took in the big eyes, the porcelain skin and the long, delicate limbs, and understood why Rik had wante
d to protect her. Hell, she felt the urge herself.
But Maria didn't run off. She stood there, chewing her lower lip, and asked, “Are you and Rik...?”
“We don't have time for this.”
“I just... It's just...”
It was maddening. Why wouldn't the stupid woman just go?
“It was great at first,” Maria said. “You know? Wonderful. It really was, but then, slowly...”
Freymann didn't want this conversation and she didn't want to be standing in that alley.
“Then, slowly, what?” she snapped. “You didn't know he had problems? You didn't think he'd picked you as a substitute for his mother and sister? You looked at that big tough hunk and all you saw was the Daddy you'd never had?”
Maria looked as if Freymann had slapped her across the face. It made her relent. Maria wasn't the enemy. It wasn't Maria's fault that Freymann had some of those same feelings herself.
“OK. Look, there's nothing between me and Rik. If you want to take another shot, he's all yours. But, if you want my advice, you–”
And that was when the firefight broke out inside the bar and Freymann ran inside, not giving Maria a second thought.
As the police car trundled its leisurely way out to the spaceport, Freymann wondered for the first time whether Rik had already checked that Maria was still all right. The thought gave her a pang of jealousy, which she angrily suppressed.
“So tell us the rest,” she said, breaking the silence. Trying to turn her thoughts to something less irritating. Rik looked at her, puzzled, so she elaborated. “The rest of the story. How do you know there was only water in the phials?”
Rik looked into Freymann's eyes and smiled. “It's to do with the other thing that's been bugging me. Why pick me to be the courier? I've got no reputation. It's not even my usual line of work. I'm just a PLEO who can't get a decent client, just a washed up ex-cop in self-exile at the ass-end of nowhere, treading water but sinking fast. The only reason Cordell would pick me is so that I'd be a convincing Judas goat who could lead Lanham's people here.”
“You're going to have to give me a bit more than that.”
“OK.” He leaned forward, and so did Burleigh. “Once you know the end-game, the rest all makes sense. Cordell used Greet-Greet to recruit me. For all I know, he had his fundamentalist asshole flunkies all over the Moon looking out for someone like me: someone with few friends, no real home, hungry enough to take the job without asking too many questions.
“Nothing that happened to me from the moment I took the job with Greet-Greet has been a coincidence. They must have been feeding Lanham's guys intel all along, to make sure they sent someone into the gene lab in Berlin just in time to send me running for cover. My guess is that Rivers should have come after me once I'd taken delivery, not before – unless Cordell was hoping he'd get rid of Peth, too.
“So I run, and the first place I go for help I find my old friend Ockenden has mysteriously been killed. But that's just the start of it. Maria and her boyfriend, Blake and Brie... Cordell didn't even have to do his own dirty work – he knew Lanham would be completely ruthless in hunting me down and making sure I had nowhere to go.” He laughed bitterly. “The fact that I lost track of the package must have scared the old bastard shitless. But he made the right call in having Maria followed. Wrong call in using that woman Kirsty, but he had Clermont and the bots to back up that play, so it all worked out for him.”
Freymann saw the logic, but it still didn't explain things. “Yes, but what made you think there was no virus?”
“Why should there be? All Cordell wanted was to push the uploads into making a stupid, desperate move. All he needed for that was the possibility that he could control the credulity nexus. He could have conceived of the whole plan years ago and set up GeneWerken as a complete sham. I wouldn't put it past him.”
“Yes, but–”
“I found a man dying at GeneWerken when I went in. Rivers had almost finished him, but he had the box of phials on him and he had the strength still to hand them to me.”
“Damn!” Freymann said, angry at herself for not having noticed it earlier. “Why did he give them to you? All he should have known was that the place was under attack. He must have been expecting you. You, personally. He must have seen pictures, been briefed. They all must have. Yet...” Yet it still didn't explain why Rik thought there was no virus.
“As he handed over the box, he said, 'For we must needs die.'”
“Is it a quote? Shakespeare?”
“Military?” asked Burleigh.
“Biblical,” Rik said. “It's from the second book of Samuel. The full quote is 'For we must needs die, and are as water spilt on the ground.' Which doesn't really say much. I looked it up at the time and just dismissed it as the kind of thing a religious nut might say when he's about to die.
“But once that bot broke the phials, it suddenly came back to me, and I wondered why, out of all the things in the Bible that might have come into that guy's mind that day, that very moment, he picked 2 Samuel 14:14. Death? OK, that makes sense. But water spilled on the ground?”
“And that's it?” Freymann wasn't happy. “You talked us into breaking the quarantine based on that?”
Annoyingly, Rik just shrugged. “It seemed like a lot to me.”
Again, the thought went through her head that maybe they had all been infected and were now gullible fools, believing any half-assed conspiracy anyone cared to dream up. She pushed the thought away. If it was true, there was nothing she could do about it, and she'd better start getting used to it. But if they weren't infected – meaning Rik was right – then she'd just have to add 'brilliant' and 'intuitive' to his list of qualities. It wasn't a side of him she'd seen much sign of in their brief acquaintance, but then, she hadn't exactly been a star performer herself of late. Letting Cordell's goons kidnap her in her own home was probably the low point of her whole career.
“What about this Lanham guy?” Burleigh asked.
Rik shook his head. “I called him five minutes ago and told him the story.”
“And?”
“It takes nearly seventeen minutes round trip for a signal to Omega Point. He won't even get it for another few minutes.”
Burleigh sat back in his seat, looking worried. “This is not looking good.”
Freymann didn't like the hint of doom in his voice. “What does it matter? If we can't talk Lanham out of it, we can still take your ship up there and stop them, right? Shoot them down if we have to?”
“Shoot them?” Burleigh was clearly amazed at the idea. “You can do that kind of thing down here, young lady, but up there you cannot. Do you suppose that UNPF ships carry missiles and lasers? I assure you, they do not! No ship in space carries weapons. There are treaties going back a hundred years that expressly forbid it. The quickest way I could think of to start World War Three would be to arm a spaceship.”
There was a silence. Freymann's first thought was, “So how do we stop them?” Her second was, “So how can Lanham's ship do us any harm?” This one she said out loud.
“That's a damn good point, girl,” Burleigh said. “Anything you're not telling us, Rik?”
Rik shook his head. He seemed lost in thought. “Can we shoot it down from the ground?” he asked.
“Yeah, sure,” said Burleigh. “I'll call up Missile Command and have them fire off a salvo.” It was obvious from his tone that this was sarcasm.
Which seemed fair enough, after a moment's thought. The Moon wasn't like a nation state on Earth. It was a multinational settlement in neutral territory, licensed to scientific and commercial interests under that long string of treaties Burleigh had mentioned. That's why the UNPF policed the Moon, and space in general: because it was nobody's sovereign territory – or everybody's, depending on how you looked at it. With no weapons in space and no national borders to protect, there was no need to have military capabilities on the Moon – beyond what was needed to maintain order.
“OK,
” Freymann said, “I ask again, what can Lanham do without weapons?”
Rik shrugged again. “He's got something planned. Whatever it is, he has to take out Heinlein and leave no-one left alive. Maybe he'll just toss one of those suitcase nukes out the airlock.”
“It doesn't work like that,” Burleigh said, obviously taking the suggestion seriously. “It would just stay in orbit. They'd need an engine to slow it down, something to steer it, targeting... They'd need a missile.”
A horrible thought came to Freymann. “Or they could be the missile,” she said. “If they used their ship to dive into the city... You wouldn't need a nuke to destroy something as small and fragile as Heinlein. One high-velocity impact from a hundred-tonne spaceship ought to do it.”
Burleigh's eyes went wide. “Shit! Would they do that, Rik?”
To Freymann's relief, Rik shook his head. “I don't think so. It's Cordell's people who are the fanatics, not Lanham's. Don't forget, these are uploads. They all want to live forever. I can't see them giving their lives for the cause.” He pondered for a moment, but seemed happy with his reasoning. “No. They have some other way.”
“OK,” Freymann said. She'd driven meetings like this before, pushing people to think around the problem. She knew that ideas came, in the end, no matter how unlikely it seemed. “If they can't drop a bomb and they can't fire a missile and they can't dive on us from space, why take the ship up there to hover over us? What's that all about?”
“Pull over! Stop the pod!” Burleigh shouted. They slewed off the road and onto the hard shoulder. “They're up there watching,” he said. “The bomb is already down here, waiting for their signal.”
Rik looked convinced. “But where the hell could it be? We don't have time to search the whole town.”
“Rivers!” Freymann saw it at once. “It's got to be her. How else could they keep a bomb big enough close to you?”
“Rivers?”
“Sure. I know they talk about suitcase bombs, but they can fit them into anything these days. I've seen specs for just the kind of thing they need. Nanotech makes it easy. They suspend plutonium particles in a matrix of boron and gold. When they need the bomb it flows like a liquid to a central point and self-assembles. It takes a few minutes to go from nothing to a working A-bomb.”
The Credulity Nexus Page 24