“The grid again,” Mitsuno concluded.
“Yes, of course.”
Thud! The first grapple made mechanical contact with one of the walker’s leg joints. The others took their grip, and the tug jetted steam, applying pressure against the torque of the spinning hull. Various creaks and groans were transmitted into the cabin as the walker took the strain and stabilized.
As spin came off the hull, Lole felt himself drifting away from the forward bulkhead. He wedged his shin between it and the front edge of the control console to hold himself in place. The other two were still strapped into their chairs.
The tug and its latching hooks were clearly visible out the side windows, but Mitsuno was studying the view through the windshield again. He was looking for the solar power station—and not finding it.
Bump! The walker struck something with its rear end. The impact was solid enough to feel, sharp enough to jar Lole’s and Demeter’s heads gently on their necks, but not powerful enough to throw them around or hurt them. Still, Lole saw nothing out the front.
“What the—?” he began.
“I believe we just docked,” Torraway said.
“But there’s nothing in—”
“Our airlock is back that way.” The Cyborg hooked a thumb over his shoulder. The dark face might have been grinning at him. “I think somebody out there knows that, too.”
The three of them were all turned now, facing the rear of the cabin. Unbidden, the lock cycled and the inner door opened. Beyond was a brightly lighted, man-sized corridor, circular in cross section, lined with curved panels of neutral-gray plastic. It looked like a null-gee inspection access. From the conspicuous lack of a whistling wind about their ears, Mitsuno guessed that the corridor was pressurized.
“That’s an invitation, I guess,” Demeter said. “I’d just as soon decline.”
“Me, too,” Lole agreed.
The Cyborg sat like a pensive statue, his gaze fixed down the tube. He was clearly focused on the first turn as the corridor curved out of sight. Mitsuno wondered what signals Torraway’s electromagnetic senses were picking up. He was still relaxed, however, with no sign that his mechanical muscles were battling again with the grid’s silent commands.
“We can wait here,” the Colonel said impassively. “I don’t know how long…”
As if on cue, the console between them issued a crackling buzz. Something inside was shorting out, overloaded with voltages that the walker’s control circuits were never meant to carry. The metal panels along its front edge began tingling Mitsuno’s knee. Somehow the case was conducting the overload. The tingling became a burning.
“Folks…” Lole said, yanking his knee away and pushing himself up toward the cabin ceiling.
Smoke began to issue from around the keys on the console’s top surface. At first it was a barely visible white puff, but it quickly turned thick and black, with hanging clots of half-fused plastic. The air was heavy with the stale-bread smell of polymers and ozone.
Demeter began coughing and unfastened the straps holding her in the seat. With both hands over her mouth, she doubled over, drifting, pushing her face deeper into the smoke plume. Torraway released himself and caught her shoulder, guiding her up and back, away from the billowing clots.
“We have run out of options,” he said.
“Yup,” Mitsuno agreed. If the electrical fire didn’t poison them outright, it would simply eat up their oxygen. Either way, they had to retreat down that tube—in the direction the grid wanted them to go. The nexus was prepared to destroy the walker in order to dislodge them. That would serve a double purpose, he realized: burning their bridges behind them eliminated a possible escape route.
Together the human and the Cyborg pulled the strangling woman into a patch of cleaner air. Then they took bearings, aligning themselves with the door frame around the airlock, and swam forward in single file down the tube.
Tharsis Montes, Level 1, Tunnel 15, June 20
Ellen Sorbel ran up the ramp, balancing a stack of Lethe’s memory modules against her hip. Dr. Lee followed closely behind, draped with the cable harness that interconnected the cyber’s disparate voice and visual interfaces with their plug inputs. Willie Lao brought up the rear with the stripped box for the central processor, carrying it in both hands as instructed.
Sorbel was running and urging the other two forward because she was certain that by now, after picking apart Demeter Coghlan’s infiltrated brains, the grid must know all about her plans. Only the existence of the dormant virus had remained a secret from the Earth woman, but then Lole knew about that. If the grid had him as well, it had everything.
Once the nexus possessed all the facts about the humans’ rebellion at Tharsis Montes and their weapons, then it was only a matter of time—measured probably in milliseconds—before the machines took defensive action.
Ellen not only feared retaliation but also feared her inability to predict its source and vector. Not being human, nor even consciously human-designed, the grid’s intelligence could not be expected to respond in humanly predictable ways. The machines’ take on the problem of defending themselves might come from unexpected angles and arrive at unexpected conclusions. Sorbel was not afraid just for herself or Lole, but afraid that the grid would begin its retaliation with the destruction of the space fountains to isolate Mars and then slowly poison or asphyxiate the 30,000 people living in its various tunnel complexes. The machines just might regard all humankind within their reach with the same disdain that humans viewed the bacteria and blue-green algae from which their form of life arose a billion years ago. The time scale was certainly right—if you equated years of human thought, perception, and history with a computer’s nanoseconds of cogitation.
Sorbel only knew she had to work fast now.
The trouble was finding her entry point.
Her first thought had been to establish a radio-frequency link with the grid’s communications paths. That was the way a Creole like Jory most often traded tokens with the local nexus. Except that Creoles and Cyborgs usually had reason to converse with the grid while they were working outside, on the planet’s surface. That was where reception with the grid’s antennas would be at optimum. Inside the radio-opaque tunnels, however, Creoles either kept their thoughts to themselves or tended to plug their systems physically into the circuits, with their pigtails.
Ellen knew she didn’t have time to check out a walker and carry Lethe’s components out onto the sand, set them up while wearing a clumsy pressure suit and gloves, and try to tune in a channel Jory might have routinely used. She didn’t even know if the grid would pass her through the airlocks now. So the three conspirators had to work with what resources were at hand, from inside the tunnels.
They didn’t have a spare pigtail. The closest one available to them was back in the safe zone, attached to Jory den Ostreicher’s skull. Even if they took the time to go back, surgically remove it, and bring the jack here to the pile of Lethe’s disassembled parts—they still didn’t have an input port that would tie it to their rogue central processor. They would have to splice something.
That gave Sorbel an idea.
She studied the face of a nearby public terminal, recessed into the tunnel’s rock wall.
“How does that thing talk to the grid?” she asked aloud, more rhetorically than for information.
Willie Lao shrugged. “Dunno.”
Dr. Lee gave it some thought before responding. “By fiberoptic, I would assume.”
“The same as Lethe’s cabling, sure!” Ellen felt a growing enthusiasm. “We take apart that panel, and we’ll find our own pigtail.”
“What? I don’t—”
“Listen, we want to link up with the grid, right? If Jory were inside the complex, he’d jack in through a terminal like this one, wouldn’t he? He’d use his connectors to go through the terminal’s switching circuits, of course, but eventually it’s just the nexus and him, passing code. Well, Lethe can emulate a terminal easily e
nough. If we can just splice into the fiberoptic behind that panel, we’re home free.”
“We’ll get in trouble!” Lao objected.
“You think we aren’t already?” she replied.
Dr. Lee ran a hand across the smooth steel of the terminal’s bezel. “These things are pretty heavily armored against vandalism.”
“Willie, go find us a hammer and a crowbar,” Sorbel ordered. “Or a locking wrench with a slip head—” She pointed out the recurved heads of the bolts positioned around the bezel. “—if you can find one.”
“Yes, ma’am.” He nodded and ran up the tunnel.
“Now, Doctor,” she said, turning her attention to Wa Lixin. “How’s your surgical technique with teeny-tiny ligatures?”
“Not to worry.” He grinned. “I wasn’t sure about the issue date on Jory’s internal hardware, so I came fully prepared to cut glass. I’ve got an optical junction box with me.” He pulled a black L-shape, about two centimeters long, out of his pocket. “Just thread in the ends and crimp the sockets.”
“Excellent!” Ellen Sorbel suddenly felt better about the whole enterprise.
Willie Lao appeared at the top of the ramp, brandishing an angled tool that might be a wrench. “Got it! There’s a maintenance closet right around the corner.”
“Better and better,” she purred. “We’ll lick the machines yet.”
Solar Power Station Six, June 20
Demeter’s throat was still raw and scratchy from the toxic smoke. But she could lift her head and kick with her feet as Lole helped her swim down the bare corridor into the power station’s interior. It was like being swallowed by an elephant’s esophagus.
Because of the orientation the space tug had given them, the three inside the walker never got a clear view of the station from the outside. But the size and curvature of the tube they were traversing hinted at a bulk and complexity far larger than the simple, silicon sunflowers she had once visited by proxy.
While Lole Mitsuno guided her right elbow, Roger Torraway preceded them both. The Cyborg’s left wing fluttered helplessly in the air currents he stirred; the right one was folded obediently against his backpack, giving him extra clearance against the walls. Demeter had the impression the colonel was limping as he led their party in infiltrating the satellite.
After what felt like a hundred meters of travel—but could have been as little as ten, or more than a thousand—they came to a door blocking the end of the corridor. It was made of interlocking triangular plates, like the irising diaphragm of an old-fashioned film camera.
“Self-reinforcing design,” Torraway said.
“Huh?” from Demeter.
“The edges of the plates are made to support each other,” he explained, “probably to hold against a sudden pressure loss. From the way they overlap, I’d say the drop was expected from this side. That would protect against someone cutting through the airlock from the outside.”
“How do we get through?” she asked.
“No lockplate or controls,” Lole observed.
On impulse Demeter called, “Open sesame,” and the door began to dilate. The plates rubbing against each other sounded like sword blades slithering edge against edge.
Inside was a spherical room in more of the matte-gray wall material. Low lighting came from a dozen soft, moon-faced panels set in an equatorial belt that aligned with the entrance. Hanging in the center of the room were three sets of full-body V/R gear—helmets, gloves, boots, and numbered sensor pads—that were webbed into three umbilicals sprouting from a ring in the ceiling. Well, “ceiling” was a relative term here; at least the point was ninety degrees offset from the ring of room lights.
Demeter had done hundreds of hours of freefall virtual-reality aboard the transport that brought her to Mars. With the right amount of feedback pressure from the boot soles, you could quickly forget that you were drifting with your stomach higher than your throat and imagine you were walking along in full gravity. The rest was a cooperative fantasy between you and the machine.
There was no way out of the room.
No way back through the crippled walker.
No options but to float there and grow old and starve.
“I guess we’re supposed to play along,” Demeter said, pushing off the portal’s coaming with her feet and paddling through the air with her cupped hands. She headed toward one set of gear.
Lole followed her, but Torraway hung back.
“Come on, Colonel!” she called. “Choices aren’t on the menu today.”
“I…I can’t wear that stuff,” he said lamely. “The pickups don’t match any of my…systems.”
“Well, fly on in here anyway,” she insisted. “If the grid means you to join the party, it’ll beam you a presentation or something.”
Torraway nodded once and pushed off. As he drifted up to the room’s focal point, he cupped his good wing and made a sporadic flutter with the bad one to brake himself.
Demeter had already pressed the numbered sticky pads against her right temple, throat, left armpit, solar plexus, and groin—opening her jumper to make the last three connections. She shed her walking boots and tugged on the tight feedback footwear. She pulled her long braid of hair to one side and slid the full-face helmet over her head, then slipped on the wired gloves.
There was a flash of static as the program began, and Demeter found herself floating in a gray, spherical room with a ring of twelve lights orbiting her at elbow level.
Lole Mitsuno and Roger Torraway had disappeared.
Harmonia Mundi…
Lole Mitsuno was walking on the surface of Mars in his shirtsleeves. The toes of his corridor slippers kicked up dust that drifted in the same familiar, lacy blooms as when he tramped along in sealed boots. The same steady winds pushed against his legs and torso, but now they were flapping his loose-weave slacks instead of dimpling the heavy fabric of a pressure suit. The air in his nose was sharp and cold, but still breathable.
He hop-stepped over the black rocks scattered across lemon-colored sand. Lole was sure he had visited this place recently. It was…Harmonia Mundi, where he had last seen Roger Torraway. The last time outside, that is.
After a thousand meters of this broken-field walking Mitsuno came upon an anomaly: a patch of sand perhaps ten meters square that had been cleared of rocks and raked smooth. A circle two meters in diameter had been scratched in this surface.
A boy of about eleven years squatted outside the circle. He was completely naked, with a thatch of straight black hair that came down into his almond-shaped eyes. Mitsuno guessed he was of Eurasian extraction. The skin was pale, though. When he glanced up at Lole, the boy’s canine teeth showed in a familiar grin. This boy was…Jory den Ostreicher, as he once was. Before the surgeries that made him Creole, that is.
After the briefest glance of recognition, Jory returned his attention to the game he was playing. His right hand balled into a fist, with the thumb tucked under the index finger. Something glowed inside that fist. He flicked his thumb, and a bright bead, a comet—no, a tiny sun—streaked forward into the circle.
Lole followed its path with his eyes, and for the first time Mitsuno noticed that the circle enclosed other suns, which orbited lazily in a whirlpool pattern. Jory’s white dwarf collided with one of them, splashing a rainbow from its corona and drawing out a flare of burning hydrogen. The newcomer upset the established pattern, perturbing the orbit of two nearby red giants and spinning a white dwarf out of the cluster, across the line in the sand.
The boy hopped up and skipped to the other side of the circle. He gathered up the errant dwarf and put it in a bag that suddenly was sitting beside him on the sand. The brown leather of its outer surface bulged and seethed faintly. Mitsuno imagined other tiny suns in there, squirming with the increased pressure and gravity.
Jory looked up at Lole again. That toothful grin was back. “Wanna play?”
Lole smiled. “I didn’t bring any…marbles.”
“S’okay,
you can use some of mine.” The boy hefted the bag. “We’ll just play for funsies.”
Tonka, Oklahoma…
Roger Torraway was walking down the center of the street in a pleasant suburban neighborhood. On either side were broad green lawns that came down to the poured-cement curbs. Driveways two cars wide, of sealed blacktop bordered with low hedges, divided the lawns. White frame houses with either green or blue trim, including shutters that were too narrow to cover their windows and anyway were nailed onto the clapboards, presided over these quarter-acre domains. Most of the houses were ranch style, but here and there was a two-story Dutch colonial looking vaguely out of place on the remodeled prairie. The sun was out, much brighter and stronger here than it was on Mars. Its rays felt strong and nourishing on Roger’s solar wings. It felt good.
This street was certainly familiar, although the last time he’d seen it was in the winter, near midnight. It was…Tonka, in the residential development where he and Dorrie had lived. The house on the right was his. Had been his, that is.
He walked the ten meters up the flagstone path from the driveway to the front entrance. The white-painted oak door, with six recessed panels and a gleaming brass pull and latch, stood ajar. He pushed on it with a black-skinned hand.
“Hi, honey!” The female voice was light and familiar but stretching to call over some distance. “I’m in the game room.”
That was an anomaly, because Torraway couldn’t remember the Tonka house having a “game room.” A den, yes, where Roger did his reading, kept his checkbook, and wrote his infrequent correspondence. But nothing like a game room. Knowing that he was in some kind of waking dream, he walked left down the hall in any case, toward the den.
The room was dark, with the curtains drawn. The desk, easy chair, and end table with the ceramic lamp had all been cleared out. In their place was a pool table, and all the light came from two hanging lamps with opaque, conical shades. Their white light reflected greenly off the table’s felt surface.
Dorrie was at the table, her back to him, a cue stick in her hand. That was odd because, to his knowledge, she had never played pool and detested all stuffy indoor games on general principles. She was a volleyball-at-the-lake sort of person. Especially if she could dance around and show off her new bikini.
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