by John Rankine
Each fed in some information and some opinion. There was an account of the progress of the rogue moon. Gregor had left the monitoring to a specialist; but for some time, he had been aware that unusual levels of electromagnetic activity had been causing autoadjustment gear to flip in his head. The report confirmed it. Things would get worse before they improved. They were moving into an unknown situation and its effects could not be quantified with any certainty.
The report made it clear that the effects would pass and status quo would return, but what was the best way of meeting them was not clear. The suggestion filtering round the net was that all senior personnel with delicate brain structures should be switched to Non Op on a time base, so that they would be undamaged by any random surge that hit a sensitive frequency.
Gregor fed in a little criticism. Was that positive thinking? At such a time the android community would be completely vulnerable. If the Copreons, who were no fools, picked that one up, they would be in with a rush to seize control.
The counter answer was that the strategic centres could be sealed off by a force field that the Copreons could not pass; but Gregor remained dubious. Given time, the barriers could be circumvented. He tentatively fed in a compromise solution with certain top androids shut down and sealed off as an insurance against disaster, while others, himself included, remained operational to sweat it out.
This found acceptance and the computer lit up, six cherries in a row, to record a policy decision.
Another piece of information dropped into the pool. The substance of Rama’s conversation with the two Alphan women, coded into short statements, was up for interpretation. Zenobia, the female-type android, was quick to see the implications. Time would no longer be on their side. The Copreons would have a built-in immortality of their own. They could not be left to disappear by natural wastage. The price of android survival would be continual vigilance. Indeed, at some point, a hot war might have to be mounted to neutralise an expanding Copreon population.
Gregor took the point. He did not ask whether the Copreon plan for sponsored motherhood would work. He knew that data banks had been checked and the project was scientifically feasible. But he left decision on it to ride for a spell. There was another factor to consider. Sensitive to any alien movement along the metal-veined tunnels of the surrounding hills, the android defence specialist told the group that the four male Alphans had reached a point where they could break into the Copreon powerhouse. Their intention was obvious, but logically it was nonsense. They could not hope to be successful against such numbers.
However, there was no doubt that the Copreons were due for some internal confusion. Their attention would be concentrated on the unexpected invasion. From their own recent experience, the androids had it on record that the Alphans were determined and resourceful. They would make a stir out of all proportion to their numbers.
All the information gelled into a pattern and there was a consensus. Gregor put it into a statement for the log. In form, it was a mathematical equation, but in substance the computer recorded that a time of stress was approaching which might benefit the humans more than the androids and could put the android sector at risk. The Copreons had come up with a longterm solution to a vital problem and positive action would have to be taken to restore the balance. There was every chance of a diversion being created at the Copreon side door. The clear advantage would lie with a mission mounted with all speed to strike at the Copreon enclave. The main aim would be to seize and destroy the Alphan women and disperse the Copreon community.
The advantage of operating on one mental network would have been an object lesson to any committee. There was no debate. Nobody sounded off to hear his own voice or proposed a contrary policy for the hell of it. Logical analysis had gotten them to a policy decision and there were no abstainers. It was only left to get the show on the road and Gregor began to feed precise instructions into the command computer.
Before he had finished, the first units were beginning to move. Black storm troops were thumping along corridors to elevator cages and dropping to the basement, where shuttles were manoeuvring out of sidings to line up for military-transport service. Hatches in the tunnel system were being opened and tracked robots with thermic lances were trundling into the labyrinth to find their blind way under the hill. Overland, a specially equipped personnel carrier, with bridging gear and a turret-mounted gun, clawed its way onto the old road and set out to climb to the pass, where it could dominate the Copreon valley.
Plugged into the console, Gregor could see it all in 3-D in the holographic web of his freewheeling mind. He was Napoleon on his knoll, without the disadvantage of having ricochets whip past his hat. The exercise gave him no illusions of grandeur; but there was the satisfaction of seeing his plan bodied forth in precise actions. There was no cavalry troop riding the wrong way, because its commander was a born fool. No confusion of any kind. As far as he could see, the attack was unstoppable. The only query that rose in his mind was why, indeed, he had not done it before.
Getting out of the medicentre had been a worthwhile aim in itself; but once through the hatch and free to move, Helena Russell was stuck for a programme. Tuned on the same wavelength, Sandra looked her question.
They were in an empty corridor with a T junction twenty metres ahead and archways opening off at intervals on either side. At any time a Copreon might appear and wearing the national costume would be no cover. They were two of a different kind.
Footsteps from round the corner forced a decision. Helena whipped off her sandals and pointed to the nearest archway. Barefoot, they sprinted for it and were through as the oncoming feet changed direction and came towards them.
It could have been a guardpost and put them among a section of licentious soldiery, but Alphan fortune was looking up: they had gotten into a medical store with glass-fronted cabinets and bulk packs of supplies. There was a wheeled stretcher trolley, set up with a plasma drip on a swivel boom and a rack of sterile gowns under a transparent cover.
The footsteps had turned off. Whoever it was, had only given a casual glance at the sentry propped on the end hatch. Voice at a whisper, Helena said, ‘We must join the others. But where will they be? Were they taken at the same time?’
‘Perhaps not. They’d be no use on a motherhood kick.’
‘How would they explain our disappearance?’
‘Perhaps they didn’t try. Perhaps they said we had not been seen by anyone.’
‘Commander Koenig wouldn’t believe that.’
‘He might not believe it, but he would have to accept it.’
‘Just supposing that was the way they played it, what would follow?’
‘They’d look around with the Copreons pretending to help.’
‘Inside and outside?’
Sandra was warming to the imaginative bit and could almost see the scene in her mind’s eye.
‘Of course. They would say we had gone outside to look at their beautiful valley. They will all be outside looking behind every tree.’
‘I thought data analysts stuck to known facts.’
‘When we have nothing to analyse, we invent it.’
‘You could be right by an offbeat chance. In any case, it gives us an objective. We must try to get out into the valley. At least we could get to Eagle Nine.’
Sandra pushed the trolley and it moved easily on soundless casters. She said, ‘I am more like them than you are. In one of those gowns, I might pass as a Copreon. You lie on the stretcher, all covered up and I’ll wheel you along the corridor.’
‘We might be going the wrong way for the casualty centre.’
‘I don’t think people think like that. They think “There, but for a happy chance, go I” and nip smartly aside.’
Helena Russell looked at Sandra with a new respect. Experience told her she was right. She said, ‘That could be true. Let’s go.’
Covered by her sheet, she had a restricted view of the walls and thought philosophically that i
t was no bad thing for a doctor to get a patient’s eye view of the set. If ever they got clear, she would remember it.
Sandra wheeled the trolley along at a smart clip, making small adjustments to the plasma-drip gear, as though it would be a close run thing for the victim. It went by the book for two Copreons, who appeared out of an arch, as soon as she turned the corner. By his tone, one was asking a civil question, but seemed content that a dedicated nursing orderly might be too busy to answer.
The trolley rolled on. Sandra was taking random choices at every intersection. When she came to a stop at the end of a cul de sac, Helena shifted her shroud to take a look. ‘Where are we, then?’
Both listened. It was so quiet they could hear their own heartbeats. Sandra said, ‘I have a feeling that we are not on the gallery level. I believe we are on the ground floor or perhaps even below it. It would be logical for all the working areas to be at the bottom and the sleeping quarters to be above.’
Helena rolled lithely out of her bed and held her breath as if she were listening through a stethoscope. There was a faint sound. More of a vibration than a sound in itself and very difficult to place.
She said, ‘There must be more than one way out into the valley. I think I can hear machinery. There would be a way of getting to a powerhouse without taking everything through the front door.’
Sandra was examining the cladding on the end wall. She said suddenly, ‘This is one of their hidden doors. How do they open them?’
Once they had it, it was easy enough to see. A small section of cladding, shoulder high on the right-hand wall, moved at a touch and revealed the switchgear. There was a single lever. Sandra shoved it over and the dead end swivelled on its centre. There was room to push the trolley through out of sight onto a square platform which was the floor of a freight hoist.
The open panel was a good ten centimetres thick and had been an acoustic seal. Once through, the rhythmic beat of powerful plant on load came clearly from somewhere below their feet. Sandra checked the operating panel. Symbols marked various levels and the lowest had a stylised version of a turbine. If they wanted the powerhouse, that was likely to be it. But she had a problem. She said, ‘We should close that hatch.’
‘So?’
‘If we close that hatch we shall be in pitch darkness. How do we see the controls?’
‘Keep your finger on the spot. I’ll close the door.’
It was not until she had done it that Helena Russell recognized that they had burned their boats. It was like heaving down the slab on a tomb. The darkness was intense and numbing to the mind. If the hoist did not work, they were stuck in a prison of their own choice where they might rot. There would be no finding the opening mechanism again.
Sandra had kept one finger on the panel and was waving her free hand for human contact. When it homed on Helena’s shoulder, she gave a surprised cry. ‘Is that you?’
‘Who else were you expecting?’
‘For God’s sake don’t move away or I won’t know who I’m in here with.’
She pressed the selector stud and a red telltale flicked into life on the panel. After total darkness it was enough to see by. They could have been women of the tribe, dyed crimson and busy at some arcane rite with the plasma bottle swinging overhead like a lantern. The cage dropped like any stone, tripped an air brake and hissed to a stop. Except for four supports, one at each corner, there were no walls and Helena had to close her mind to what might have happened if one of them had moved and tried to lean on a nonexistent cage.
But there was enough to keep her mind on load. Journey’s end was brightly lit. It could have been a natural cavern in the mountain which had been trimmed and adapted to serve as the powerhouse for the complex. There was a row of ten sleekly cowled generators. Spidery gantries crisscrossed over the open space. There was a horseshoe console to control the enterprise and a number of Copreon men in blue kilts, some with bulbous carbines on shoulder straps, were dotted about the floor area or sitting on swivel chairs at the console.
One thing was for sure. Going along with the trolley would cut no ice. No nurse, however bemused, could have gotten that far off beam.
The open-sided hoist platform had slipped quietly down its guide pillars and come to rest on a metre-high platform with a ramp leading down for wheeled traffic and a sheer drop on three sides. Backed up on the right-hand side was a forklift truck. Its lifting gear had been raised and turned to a rest position over the squat cab.
Sandra Benes pointed down the cellar. Away at the far end, the centre aisle made an ongoing roadway which rose up a long ramp and disappeared through an open arch. It looked like the way out. Even as Helena nodded agreement, they were being checked. One of the operators at the horseshoe console slewed round in his chair and stopped in midswing. He had worked down in the powerhouse, shift on and shift off, for more years than he liked to think about and it was the first time he had seen the hoist used. Now it had brought a medical team that nobody had asked for and one, at least, of the duo on the platform was outside experience altogether, being fair skinned and honey blonde.
It was a lot to take in towards the end of a duty stint which had been very dicey, with the power take-up from the magnetic fields showing wilder fluctuations with every passing minute. A bleep from his console had him swinging back to give attention to another adjustment.
Sandra said urgently, ‘We have to look busy.’
‘Doing what?’
‘It doesn’t matter. I’ll try to start that truck. Then you can load the trolley on it and we’ll drive out.’
She vaulted off the platform and slid into the driving seat. Her natural flair for sorting a path through switchgear was still standing up. A motor started sweet as a nut and after one false move, that had the lifting arm in a flailing spin, she got the method and dropped the fork beams neatly at Helena’s feet.
Other Copreons were watching the action. But Sandra was right. Being busy and purposeful was the key. Nobody examined the logic of loading a medical trolley on the arms of a forklift. Helena joined Sandra in the cab. The truck moved smoothly away towards the exit. They were halfway home, when a big scanner on the console glowed into life and Rama herself appeared, head and shoulders, making an all-stations call.
Without a smile on it, her face was a hard, executive job and whatever she was saying was bad news. She was still speaking, when the operator, who had first seen the Alphans arrive, got it all sorted in his head and fairly leaped to his feet, leaving his chair in a wild spin. His yell was muffled by the all-pervading thrum of the machinery, but the labour force got the message. All eyes turned to the truck and Sandra, seeing that the flimsy cover was blown, shoved down the power feed for a full due. Speed doubled. It was not fast by spaceflight standards, being about a hand gallop. But it was a lot for the truck. Bucking and swaying, with the bottle of plasma swinging every which way, it made a straight dash for out.
John Koenig looked at the closed hatch and remembered the wheel-locking system he had seen from the other side. It would be like trying to break into a bank vault. Massive bolts would be shot into sockets in the rock. Laser beams could fuse the lock, but cutting a panel was another thing. He tried an experimental shot. The metal glowed white hot, but stayed in shape. There would not be enough charge in the four lasers to do the job and if they just succeeded, they would have disarmed themselves.
Victor Bergman had been watching, with his head thrust forward in his characteristic fashion, when there was a problem. He said, ‘What’s the military maxim? Never take a strong point head-on? We have to outflank it.’
Thumping the wall with a balled fist, Carter said, ‘Through here, Professor? Hand me a pick and call me Monte Cristo.’
Bergman had opened the butt of his laser and was taking out one of the two power units. He said, ‘Excavate a narrow slot beside the hatch, wedge in one of these clips and ignite it.’
Koenig was already working on it. He beamed at the rock itself. Morrow joined him with
a flat sliver of stone as a scraper and they scooped out a cleft, two centimetres wide to a hand’s depth. When it was done, Bergman tamped home the charge and packed the hole with small fragments.
Koenig sent the others along the gallery and dropped three rungs down the ladder, so that he was head and arm over the rim of the ledge. He rested his fist on the rock and sighted for the slot. The fine beam flared over the gap and turned the loose chippings to instant lava.
Nerves at a stretch, he believed that Bergman had miscalculated. Either the flashpoint threshold for the electrochemical unit was too high, or they had shoved the clip too far from the heat source. Then the wall ahead was opening like a flower in time lapse and he was ducking below the rim, arm hooked in the ladder, which was swaying like any sapling in a gale. Torn from its hold, the hatch cover took off in free flight, spinning on its axis and giving out a banshee wail.
Inside the powerhouse, there was a momentary stop. All hands switched direction to check out the gaping hole that had appeared dead centre in the long wall and was jetting dust and small fragments of rock like shrapnel.
Rama’s all-stations call had alerted them to the escape of two Alphan women and to the more serious threat that the android commune had suddenly mounted a hot war. They had been told to expect maximum demand on power to maintain defensive screens.
Two things they could do, being flexible; but three needed sorting out into priorities. When Koenig and Carter launched themselves through the breach, lasers questing for a target, it was too much for the engineer in charge. He sat, open mouthed at his console, watching the newcomers in simple disbelief.
But the armed detachment rallied to the flag. There were ten on the floor with a section leader. He had heard Rama say that the Alphan women were wanted alive, but he reckoned it would be all one if they were damaged a little. Yelling orders in a stream, he detached three men to stop the truck and told the rest to take cover and fire at the new arrivals.
Koenig sized up the set in a racing scan. He had not expected to blow a hole in the wall and get inside unnoticed, but neither had he thought there would be a guard detail already on alert and trigger-happy. What Helena and Sandra were doing in a crazy, mixed-up buggy was a black mystery, but the hornet snarl of an old-fashioned shell whipping past his left ear told him there was no time for civil enquiries. It was also clear that there was a chase going on and the truck was a prime target. Bergman and Morrow were in through the gap and he called urgently, ‘Get to cover. Pick the bastards off.’
