“But the fusion plant can be cut from Downtown,” Wescott objected.
Fisher shook his head. “They tried as soon as they heard we were taking real casualties. It didn’t work! When Spartacus started ripping out every wire that didn’t belong to it, it must have hit the emergency line from the Command Room.” The others stared at him aghast. Fisher nodded wearily.
“That’s right. The only way to shut that plant down now is from the inside . . . And Spartacus is in there. We’re not.”
CHAPTER THIRTY-FOUR
“Fifty-seven dead and more than one hundred and fifty wounded!” Dyer brought his fist down hard on the table and bared his teeth. “There was no need for it! If you’d had the troops where they were needed, it would never have gotten out of hand.”
“It wouldn’t have made any difference,” Linsay replied through tight lips. “They would have been too dispersed across Detroit to be effective at any one place. The only difference it would have made is that the enemy would now be all over the Rim instead of being contained in the Spindle. As things are, the Rim is secure. All drones in the Hub and Rim have been knocked out and the backup stations are handling the environment okay. All Spartacus nodes outside the Spindle are being dismantled. The only parts of it still running are the parts south of the Hub and it’s sealed in there. The enemy has been forced back to a restricted area and we are in full control of the only exits.”
“It wasn’t forced back; we were forced out!” Dyer raged. “Your ‘restricted area’ is all it needs. It’s got Christ knows how many homemade SPs in there, a fusion plant, a manufacturing complex and an extraction plant! It’s got a stock of unprocessed moonrock that’ll keep it growing itself and making drones for days . . . maybe weeks. You could have stopped it grabbing Detroit. That alone would have been enough to cripple it.”
“It wouldn’t have made any difference,” Linsay replied grimly. “What caught us was the surprise. Nobody knew it would come up with improvised flamethrowers. Your thinking didn’t allow for it and my thinking didn’t allow for it. I still don’t know what gave it the idea, but it’s happened. We can’t change it.”
“And meanwhile there’s nothing to stop it turning out as many destroyers and flying bombs as it wants,” Dyer retorted. “The kill-teams have had their hands full even without that. How are they going to shape up when their destroyers start getting attacked? It could happen anytime in the next couple of hours. Spartacus hasn’t even used its own destroyers yet and it’s kicked us out of half of Janus!”
“It won’t have the element of surprise a second time,” Linsay pointed out. “Also, we have the advantage of position. They can only come out of the Spindle through a few access points and we’ve got those covered from all angles and in depth. Nothing can get through to the Hub. That was the whole purpose of my strategy, which you still seem unable or unwilling to appreciate.”
A silence ensued while the two men glowered at each other across the table. Finally Krantz, who was the only other person present, spoke from a point midway between them.
“We could go on like this forever. Perhaps we’ll never know for sure which of you was right, but recriminations can wait for a more opportune time. For the moment we have more urgent matters to attend to.” He turned his eyes toward Linsay. “What are the arrangements for getting those people out of Southport?”
Linsay paused for a second to calm down, and then spread a plan of Janus on the table in front of them.
“The incoming traffic of catchers from Luna has been stopped, naturally,” he began. “There are approximately two hundred persons in the Southport redoubt. Two shuttles are being loaded with fully equipped combat troops at Northport. The shuttles will dock at Southport to strengthen the position there and prepare it for use as an assault bridgehead. The ships will evacuate casualties and noncoms to Northport, collect fresh troops there and return to Southport to reinforce the units previously landed. Then we will commence a simultaneous attack on two fronts by advancing along the Spindle from both ends. Spartacus will be forced back by the hammer moving south from the Hub, onto the anvil moving north from Southport. The prime objective for the spearhead units will be to penetrate to the fusion plant and deactivate it. Other units have been ordered to act in supporting roles with that as the main thrust.” He shot a challenging look at Dyer. “Does that meet with the doctor-general’s approval?”
Dyer ignored the sarcasm and looked at Krantz.
“What’s the point of this? We’ve got our answers now. Fifty-seven people who won’t be going home are enough to tell me what we do about TITAN. It was never supposed to come to this. Why risk any more? I say pull everybody out now and let ISA take out this whole damn place with a big nuke.”
Krantz assumed a meditative posture with his fingers steepled in front of his face. He stared gravely at them for what seemed a long time and then shook his head slowly. His reply was quiet but determined.
“I think not, Ray. As you say, the experiment was never expected to go to the extremes that we have seen, but it has. We are now at a crucial juncture. I see a great psychological need for us to pursue this to its end now, and to be seen to win. If we pull out now, what will the world see? It will see that we—a symbol of the human race itself—were defeated and had no effective reply left to offer. How do you think that knowledge would color our thinking for years, maybe decades, to come?” He shook his head again. “No. Now that we have come this far, we must prove that, although Man may sometimes make mistakes, he can always rise above them in the end. If we can do that much, your fifty-seven will not have died for nothing at all.”
Dyer sat back and hunched his shoulders as he drew a long breath, then released it at once in a sudden sigh. Krantz was right.
“Or whatever the numbers end up as when it’s all over,” he said heavily.
Back on the Command Floor, Fred Hayes, who had been keeping watch on the dais while Dyer, Krantz and Linsay retired for their private conference, updated Dyer on what had been happening. Things had been fairly quiet, compared with earlier events anyway. Spartacus had tried moving its latest troops northward along the Spindle to the Hub, but this time the defenders had been well prepared and waiting, and the attack had collapsed rapidly. A similar fray with similar results had occurred at the perimeter around Southport. That was about all.
Feeling slightly relieved and a little more optimistic, Dyer walked over to where Laura was standing with Chris, Ron and a couple of CIM scientists. She saw him approaching and detached herself from the group to join him.
“Home is the hero,” she said. “You look as if you just came from picking an argument with the whole of the Marine Corps.” Dyer looked down at himself. He had come straight to the Command Room after returning from the Hub. His clothes were tattered and spattered with blood in places, and if his face was the same streaky colors as his arms he must look like a Zulu in war paint. The flippancy went out of Laura’s voice and face abruptly. “Was it rough?” she asked.
“It was . . . rough.”
“I was worried sick. Every time we got a list of latest arrivals at the Hub and your names weren’t there, I just . . . Well, you’re okay. I guess it doesn’t matter now.” She began walking with him over to the coffee dispenser on one side of the room. “Did you hear about Kim?”
“No, I didn’t.” Dyer turned a serious face. “What about her?”
“She cracked up,” Laura told him. “When all those people got hit, that did it. She headed up the team that wrote the System. It was too much.”
“What happened?”
“Oh, nothing dramatic. Her guilt hang-up about the whole thing bubbled over and she just went quietly to pieces. The doc’s given her a sedative and she’s lying down.”
“At home?”
“No, upstairs. She’ll be out for a while. Doc thinks we ought to ship her out with the casualties.”
“I’ll go talk to him later,” Dyer muttered. He frowned to himself as he poured coffee into a
cup. Another damn thing that he’d seen coming and never got around to doing anything about. If this was what they called learning the hard way, he wondered how he’d managed to survive all those years at all. And already he felt unhappy about their not declaring Emergency Red, and he wasn’t doing very much to bring that about. But he couldn’t; that was Krantz’s decision to make. Dammit, he could try. This wasn’t an argument about university timetables; it was life and death for people. Hadn’t this whole lunatic project been his bright idea in the first place? He checked his flow of thought there with an effort. Much more like that, he told himself, and he’d be the next one to be put under sedation.
He raised the cup to his lips and washed the bitter taste of smoke from his mouth with a long, grateful swig. Laura was watching him and saying nothing.
“You haven’t given me the speech yet,” he said.
“What speech?”
“The I-told-you-so speech. Wasn’t it me who always told you that computers were nothing to worry about? There’s a computer out there that’s just murdered fifty-seven people. So why don’t you tell me I was wrong?”
“Because you weren’t,” Laura told him grimly. “Factories kill people. Airplanes kill people. So do steel plants, coal mines, high windows, oil refineries and a million other things. That isn’t murder. Sometimes it happens because somebody somewhere didn’t know as much as he thought he did. It’s a shame it has to be that way but you can’t change the way it is. What you’re doing here is trying to find out. It’s something that has to be done.”
Dyer swilled the dregs of his coffee around in his mouth and spat them into the sink below the dispenser. By rights, surely it should have been Kim standing there saying things like that. It should have been the romantic idealist from Zeegram, surely, who should have been put to bed protesting and sedated upstairs. And suddenly it came to him how many lifetimes of front-line soldier’s wisdom Danny Cordelle had packed into one short, simple statement when he had warned him, “Y’ never can tell . . .”
CHAPTER THIRTY-FIVE
Nobody ever found out exactly what caused the disaster at Southport.
It could have been damage to some vital piece of equipment during the sporadic fighting that had taken place there before the drones were pushed back and the perimeter was being secured. It could have been a result of the modifying and remodifying of control circuits that had been going on, performed by both human engineers and Spartacus’s activities, for days. It could have been Spartacus. Possibly it was a million-to-one combination of all three. Afterward the designers of the safety interlocks insisted that in theory it couldn’t happen, even with million-to-one odds. But that was in theory . . .
The antechamber behind the docking-bay airlocks at Southport was crowded with personnel assigned for evacuation to Northport when the first shuttle mated at Bay One. Minutes later the numbers were swollen further as the first company of marines doubled through the lock on their way to reinforce the perimeter.
The second shuttle was just nosing in toward the outer door of Bay Two when the door opened. The inner door had already been opened to speed up the two-way transfer of people after the shuttle docked.
Within seconds everybody who had been in the antechamber had become a blob of decompressed jelly hurtling away into the blackness of space.
Through somebody’s quick thinking the doors that connected the antechamber through to the inner sections of Southport were closed quickly enough to save those who were still manning the perimeter. But they were desperately few, comprising only the front-line destroyer teams and riflemen who had been detailed to guard the perimeter until the marines from Northport arrived to strengthen them.
They were too few to hold when, just a matter of minutes later, Spartacus attacked.
The attacking force included the first of Spartacus’s destroyers and purpose-built bombs. The defenders fought well and to the last, but they never really had a chance. The last message to come over the emergency channel to the Command Room told of the latest development in Spartacus’s evolving awareness of what was causing what in the universe around it. It was directing its flying artillery not at the defenders’ drones, but directly at the soldiers controlling them. The news was relayed hastily to the units positioned at the Hub. Meanwhile, with no bridgehead left to develop, the second wave of marines was ordered to abort its mission and to return to Northport.
The first drones to break through the doors into the antechamber were blasted suddenly forward by the rush of air and floundered about helplessly without power or steering in the vacuum chamber that it had become. Spartacus sealed the doors again and pondered. Then it sent in floor-crawling drones that ran a connection into the computers of the Southport backup station, which had previously been isolated from Spartacus’s net, and began to interrogate the data stored there. The data included encoded pictures of the events that had taken place, as captured by the monitoring cameras located at strategic points around the antechamber and outside the docking bays. Spartacus analyzed the pictures . . . and pondered.
Soon afterward the floor-crawling drones closed the open airlock and Spartacus filled the area with air again to remobilize its fliers. Then it turned its attention to the catcher ships, a few of which were docked alongside the Southport unloading bay.
Spartacus had already deduced from the pictures that outside Southport was a whole new realm of existence which, unlike the inside, possessed no air. Also it knew now that the catcher ships moved in that realm. Therefore the catcher ships could move without need of air. If that was so, then perhaps drones could be built that could move without need of air. Drones like that would be able to work without interference from the shapes, maybe.
For Spartacus had seen what airlessness had done to the shapes.
The whole of the Command Room had been seized by shocked, disbelieving silence. Dyer, now cleaned up and wearing fresh clothes, sat numbly at his console on the dais, his eyes still frozen on the now blank screen that had shown the carnage at Southport. Beside him, Krantz stood rigid and ashen-faced, his fingers gripping the edge of the console in front of him. Linsay was at the center of a group of silent officers, his eyes bulging and the muscles of his throat moving without making any sound.
At last Krantz came slowly back to life and dropped weakly into his seat. The faces in the room slowly turned and looked at him, waiting. The next move was his.
He leaned forward and extended a shaky hand to activate a microphone on his console. His voice was barely more than a hoarse whisper when he spoke.
“I hereby declare a condition of Emergency Red . . . I repeat again, Emergency Red. Evacuation procedure is to commence immediately. The military command will secure and hold all access routes from the Spindle to the Hub until evacuation has been completed. Those positions are to be held at all costs. That is all.” He flipped off the microphone and slumped back in his chair to stare at the far wall. Fifty miles out in space, the three ISA ships began moving in.
Sometime later, while the first batches of evacuees were being moved up the spokes and through the Hub to assemble in Northport, holes were beginning to appear here and there over the outer skins of Detroit and Pittsburgh. Machines of assorted shapes and sizes cut their way through and proceeded to set up instruments and sensors designed to scan the whole of the electromagnetic spectrum from VLF radio through to high-energy cosmic rays. Spartacus was making itself eyes to study the vast and wondrous world that it had discovered beyond Janus.
CHAPTER THIRTY-SIX
Mat Solinsky felt the familiar smoothness of the controls responding to his touch as the bug launched itself out of the airlock of the Maintenance & Spares Unit at Hub Section 17D. The huge gray sphere fell away behind and began rolling slowly over as he brought the bug around into a course that would take it diametrically outward, parallel to the Berlin spoke. In the co-pilot’s seat beside him, Mitch checked the communications link and then settled back to study the jungle of struts and lattices contained b
y the circle of the secondary reflectors and sliding by to one side of them.
“Looks clean enough here,” Mitch commented. “Which way are we gonna take it—through the ring, round the Hub and back down the other side?”
“That’s what I figured,” Solinsky told him.
The ISA ships were now standing two miles off from Janus waiting for Janus’s own shuttles to finish loading with evacuees and depart, thus freeing up the Northport docking bays. As the ISA ships closed nearer, they had sent reports of objects moving around on the exterior of Janus. Solinsky and Mitch had volunteered to take out one of the bugs for an outside view close-up.
They rounded the secondary reflector ring between the Berlin and Rocky Valley spokes and turned inward again to pass low over the immense tilted mirror panels until they were inside the ring once more and following the northern contour of the Hub around toward Northport. The two shuttles were docked beneath them like twin cubs with a mother as they passed over the northernmost tip of the Spindle and continued outward to recross the plane of the Rim between the Paris and Sunnyside spokes. From there they ascended inward again on a direct line toward the mass of Detroit.
“I see ’em!” Mitch exclaimed suddenly, and stabbed with his finger in the direction of the curving surface swelling to meet them outside. Solinsky took the bug in closer and Mitch went to work with a hand camera.
Below them, standing up from the outer skin of Detroit, was what looked like a squat lattice tripod surmounted by a fat tube. Mitch judged it to be about eight feet high. It was straddling a hole that had been cut through the skin and seemed to be connected through to the inside by a tangle of tubes and cables. Not far away was another structure, supporting a triangular cheese-shaped box, and beyond that was a pivoted cylinder which swung around to track the bug as it passed over. There were other constructions on the south slope of Detroit, facing Pittsburgh, and a few on the section of the Spindle at the bottom of the valley between. As Solinsky closed range, they picked out numerous mobile contraptions of unfamiliar design moving about on the outer surface, some of which were cooperating in erecting more permanent fixtures.
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