Cyber Rogues

by James P. Hogan

  Mitch continued to record as many details as could be seen and kept the Command Floor informed with a running commentary on what he saw. They were over Pittsburgh, where a cluster of objects had sprouted on its equator diametrically opposite its solar receiver dish, and still heading south when the controller in the Command Room interrupted Mitch in midsentence.

  “Hold it a second. We’ve got a message coming in from one of the ships.” There was a pause, presumably while the controller spoke to somebody in one of the ISA vessels holding position two miles away. Mitch and Solinsky exchanged shrugs. Then the controller’s voice came again.

  “A catcher ship’s coming out of Southport. Spartacus must be flying it because nobody else is. Watch it.”

  “Don’t worry, we will,” Mitch replied drily into his mike. He glanced apprehensively at Solinsky. “Do computers have rights on territorial limits?”

  “Looks like maybe this one figures it does,” Solinsky answered.

  “What’s it doing?” Solinsky inquired into his mike. The mass of Pittsburgh was still between the bug and Southport, so they didn’t have a direct line of sight to where the catcher ship would be.

  “It’s still moving away from you, in line with the Spindle and out from it,” the controller advised. “Moving slow . . . slower . . . bringing its stern around. Looks as if it could be fixing to come up your way.”

  “Signal it we’re not at home to callers today,” Mitch said. The catch in his voice came through the flippancy of his words. A few seconds of silence passed.

  “The ISA ship nearest you has got a missile primed and tracking on it,” the controller told them. “It’s less than four seconds away from you so you shouldn’t have any problems if it starts looking like trouble. The catcher has started to move back in toward the Spindle. It’s climbing out to clear Pittsburgh and coming around to match your position. You should see it coming over the hill any second now.”

  By this time Solinsky had put the bug into a wide turn to circle the Spindle broadside-on to the north slope of Pittsburgh. An enormous rectangular archway swung up in front of them and passed overhead as they crossed through the space between the Spindle and the inner edge of the Radiator Assembly. Mitch kept his head turned to scan the crestline of Pittsburgh.

  “There it is!” he yelled suddenly, pointing. Immediately opposite them, the yawning front end of the cone-shaped “hippo” was rising over the edge of Pittsburgh like its namesake emerging from behind a riverside mud bank. Inside its huge forward aperture, which was intended to scoop up the loads of moonrock catapulted into lunar orbit, they could see batteries of instruments, scanners, receiver and miscellaneous gadgetry all apparently aimed in their direction. At once Solinsky turned away to put more distance between the two craft, but the hippo soared higher above Pittsburgh and followed. On the surface below, dozens of curious electronic eyes followed the chase.

  Mitch looked from side to side and threw his mind into top gear to assess the position. The bug was farther in toward the Spindle than the hippo and would have to climb outward to clear Detroit. That meant that whichever way they went, the hippo would be able to gain on them by setting a straight-line course to cut them off. He didn’t like it, and said so.

  “We’re gonna lose more speed in turns too,” Solinsky said. “I’m not being chased all around Janus by that flying junk heap. Tell ’em to fire that goddam missile.”

  “We’re gonna get squeezed up against Detroit whatever we do,” Mitch shouted into his mike. “Get rid of it for Chrissakes, willya!”

  “Wilco,” the controller acknowledged, and a few seconds later confirmed: “Missile fired.”

  Seconds later something streaked out of the starry backdrop and the hippo vanished in a blaze of white and yellow. Debris showered out and cartwheeled off into space in all directions. The gas cloud dispersed almost instantaneously, leaving nothing where the hippo had been.

  “Let’s get out of here and go home,” Mitch said.

  “Good idea,” Solinsky agreed as they began climbing out and over Detroit. “Before it gets the idea of inventing SAMs.”

  Meanwhile, inside Spartacus, analysis had already begun of the data that had been gathered on the object that had come out of the realm beyond and destroyed the hippo. Evidently there were more things in existence which were capable of posing a threat to it than the shapes that infested Janus. A nearby threat plus an unknown, more distant threat . . . The distant one would require a lot of further investigation. It would be better if that could be done without the irritation of distractions. The logical thing to do would be to get rid of the shapes first . . . once and for all.

  “I don’t like it at all,” Krantz told Linsay and Dyer as they stood conferring in the center of the dais. “Spartacus has got things walking around outside the Hub and the inner reflector ring right now. It cut its way out. What’s to stop it deciding to cut its way in again? If it blew the Hub open with all those people in there waiting to get out, it would make what happened at Southport seem like nothing. And another thing—it now has parts of itself in places from which they can see the docking bays at Northport. Also, it’s found out about what’s outside Janus and it has three more catcher ships down there. Suppose it used one of them to ram a shuttle packed to the locks with evacuees. We could lose twice the number we’ve lost already.”

  Linsay, now very sober and more subdued than he had been on previous occasions, could only raise his hands wearily in front of him.

  “I know, but what else can we do?” he replied. “If a strict discipline is kept on sealing all airtight bulkheads, then even if Spartacus does break through in places casualties should be localized and kept to a minimum. If we put everybody stationed at outer positions into suits, with luck we wouldn’t take any casualties at all. The catchers don’t bother me as much right now. You saw what the missiles can do to them. There’s no way one could get out of Southport, carry out a reversing maneuver and intercept a shuttle from Northport before we knocked it out. It’d need at least three minutes and all we need is four seconds.”

  Krantz thought for a moment and then shook his head dubiously.

  “I still don’t like it. I don’t like the thought of sending ships full of people out there while Spartacus has got God alone knows what sitting waiting for them. I refuse to use any more people as guinea pigs against something we know nothing about.”

  This time Dyer thought Linsay was right. He felt that Krantz was overreacting somewhat to the burden of responsibility he was carrying for the Southport catastrophe and was playing caution too far. Also, he was worried about Kim and wanted to see the evacuation get underway so she could be taken out. The shuttles, however, had been appropriated almost entirely for battle casualties and Kim wasn’t scheduled to go until the waiting ISA ships docked, which couldn’t be until after the shuttles had departed. He found himself unable to decide in his own mind whether he agreed with Linsay as a result of an objective weighing up of the situation in general, or whether he had rationalized his own personal feelings. Therefore he said nothing.

  “What other way is there?” Linsay asked Krantz.

  “I’ve been thinking it over,” Krantz answered. “The assault from the Hub along the Spindle and into Detroit can still be mounted without a simultaneous attack from Southport. Am I right?”

  “It could,” Linsay agreed hesitantly. “We’d lose the advantage of surprise on two fronts through . . .”

  “But we could substitute an alternative surprise element instead,” Krantz told him. Linsay’s expression said that he didn’t follow so Krantz continued. “The perimeter defenses at Southport were overwhelmed when Spartacus used airborne artillery and bombs to assault our manned emplacements. Nobody expected that. They expected it to attack our drones. Suppose we grounded its whole air force at the same instant that we launch our attack from the Hub. That would stand a good chance of throwing it completely off balance long enough for us to get into the fusion plant and switch it off. It’s
worth a try, surely. If it works, we can then evacuate everybody without exposing them to any risks at all. Doesn’t that make sense?”

  Linsay nodded but continued to wear a puzzled frown.

  “Sure, but . . . I’m still not with you. How are we going to ground its air force?”

  “By taking away the air!” Krantz said. “What I propose is this—immediately before our assault from the Hub goes in, the ISA ships put a salvo of low-charge missiles into Detroit, Pittsburgh and South Spindle . . . everywhere . . . enough to blow holes into every major section. If the holes are made big enough, it should depressurize the whole of south Janus fast enough to throw Spartacus’s fliers completely out of control. Our assault troops go in with suits and make a fast thrust through to the fusion plant. Without any airborne opposition, the support units should be easily able to knock out anything else that tries to get in the way. What do you think?”

  “Well, it’s ingenious, I’ll give you that . . .” Linsay rubbed his chin and stared at the floor as he turned the suggestion over. “It might just work, I guess . . . Can’t see any obvious holes in the plan. It’d probably take a while to get organized, though. Coupla hours maybe.”

  “What are a couple of hours against hundreds of lives?” Krantz asked. He turned toward Dyer. “Ray, how do you feel about it?”

  Dyer tried again to sort through the contradictions wrestling each other inside his head but again succeeded only in confusing himself further.

  “I don’t know,” he said. “To me it seems six of one, half a dozen of the other. As you say, maybe it’s worth a try.”

  In the end Krantz’s rank decided the issue. Orders went out to suspend the evacuation preparations while Linsay and his staff went to work with the commander of the ISA ships to draw up the plans for Operation Knockout.

  Two precious hours went by. And all the time, the machines inside Detroit continued whirring and pounding.

  CHAPTER THIRTY-SEVEN

  Schroder was noticeably breathless as he hastened into the Oval Office in response to the emergency summons that had brought him from a room farther along the corridor where he had been talking with members of the Presidential staff. President Vaughan Nash and ISA Director-General John Belford were waiting with nervous, unsmiling faces. Schroder read the atmosphere the instant that he entered the room.

  “What’s happened?” he asked as he took the vacant chair opposite Nash.

  “The assault wave was cut to ribbons,” the President told him. “Spartacus used a new type of drone that runs and steers with rocket jets or something and doesn’t need air. We don’t know how. Linsay’s been pushed right back along the Spindle to the Hub and they’ve reinstated the evacuation order. John’s saying we should go to Omega.”

  Schroder swung his head sharply around toward Belford and gaped at him in horrified disbelief.

  “It’s already used a catcher and now it’s making its own spaceworthy machines,” Belford explained defensively. “At the speed the System’s been putting new devices through to production, anything could happen any minute. It’s all set to break out of Janus and I say we can’t let that happen. If we don’t stop it now, next time might be too late.”

  “But they’re evacuating!” Schroder protested. “For God’s sake—the people are getting out! We’ve got to give them a chance up there. The guts of it will still be in Janus even if it does manage to send out a few scouts, which from what you’re telling me it hasn’t even gotten around to doing yet. We can still blow its brains out after the people are off. If anything gets away in the meantime, it’ll cease functioning with the brains gone.”

  “Suppose it puts enough of its brains in a ship that gets away to start growing itself all over again,” Belford objected. “It’d be like a virus let loose all over the Solar System. The only way to wipe it out is while it’s all still in one place and we don’t know how long that’ll last.”

  “How could it grow?” Schroder demanded. “It wouldn’t have any manufacturing. And besides that, the missiles can pick off anything that does try getting away. I say no—not until the people are out.”

  “I agree with Irwin,” Nash came in. “If we woke up tomorrow and decided we’d been too hasty, it’d follow us around for the rest of our lives. We agreed that the decision had to be unanimous. It’s two to one against. Therefore we wait.”

  “Very well,” Belford concurred with a sharp nod. “I have to accept that. But I’d like my opinion committed to record.”

  Up on Janus, Dyer had left Krantz and Linsay arguing heatedly in the side conference room and returned to the Command Floor. The scene around him was one of frantic activity as the controllers and operators tried to make sense of the confused messages coming in from the Hub and to maintain some measure of coordination between what was going on there and in other places.

  The intended evacuation from Northport had again been postponed following the failure of Operation Knockout. Some of the less seriously hurt from among those wounded earlier were unloaded from the first shuttle due out, in order to make room for those seriously wounded in the course of Knockout. The work of changing the quotas was hampered by the flow of survivors pouring back out of the Spindle to regroup and by the frantic efforts going on all over the Hub to prepare new defensive positions, not only against a possible breakout from the Spindle now, but also against the possibility of break-ins from the outside. The whole of the Hub was in chaos and another full hour went by before the first shuttle was at last reported as being ready to go.

  Dyer was with Chris and Ron at the back of a group standing before one of the screens to watch the scene outside Northport as the shuttle detached from its dock and began falling away into space.

  The missile came out of a port that Spartacus had made in the north of Detroit. It had made the secondary reflector ring, skidded around to pass between the spokes, and impacted on the shuttle before the ISA ships had even had time to react. The pandemonium that erupted on every side of where Dyer was standing was cut short as the shuttle reappeared, intact, behind where the detonation had flashed.

  “It’s okay!” somebody yelled above the din. “By God, it’s made it!”

  “It’s taken a kick up the ass, though,” someone else said. “Look at its back end.”

  On the screen the shuttle had lurched off course, trailing debris from its shattered stern. It seemed to be drifting freely without any ability to correct. Its captain reported loss of steering and propulsion but, to the relief of those watching, no damage to the passenger compartments; as far as he could tell there had been no casualties. Watchdog Two, one of the three ISA ships standing by, immediately departed from its position to match course with the shuttle and begin transferring its occupants over.

  Why the missile should have been equipped with such an inadequate warhead remained something of a mystery. The most likely explanation, Dyer thought, was that Spartacus hadn’t made sufficient allowance for the lack of shock waves in the airless environment that it was only just beginning to comprehend. If so, he told himself grimly, there would be little chance of it getting its sums wrong next time.

  “Where’d it learn to make missiles?” Ron asked incredulously. “Not from the one we fired at the hippo, surely. That’s crazy.”

  “We’ve lost a lot of time since then,” Dyer reminded him. “It didn’t take long to come up with airless drones, did it? I guess we’re still learning that it gets things done a lot quicker than people.”

  Krantz and Linsay had emerged from the conference room as soon as the commotion started and by now were aware of what had taken place.

  “We’ll have to abandon evacuating,” Krantz declared. “We can’t get out and the ISA ships can’t get in.”

  “That missile was practically a dud,” Linsay argued. “The thing to do is press on. Why wait until Spartacus has made better ones?”

  “We have to take out Spartacus first.”

  “How? We tried. You saw what happened.”

  “S
partacus is running wild. You know what that means.” Beads of perspiration were beginning to appear on Krantz’s forehead. “We must stop it. ISA could put a large missile right into the middle of Detroit . . . knock out the fusion plant that way.”

  “You’re crazy,” Linsay protested. “If Detroit came apart the whole Radiator Assembly could smash straight through the Rim. You’d end up killing everybody . . . a damnsight faster than Spartacus ever could.”

  “It’s a chance we have to take. We don’t have any other.”

  Dyer was half listening, puzzling over what it was that Linsay was supposed to know, when he noticed Laura gesturing from the edge of the group of people that included Chris and Ron. He walked quickly back and raised his eyebrows in response to the look of urgency written across her face.

  “Kim’s gone,” she said.

  “What do you mean, ‘gone’?”

  “She’s disappeared. She was scheduled to be shipped up to the Hub as soon as the first shuttle had left. When the medics went to her room upstairs to get her, she’d vanished.”

  “Oh Christ!” Dyer spread his hands helplessly and motioned at the bedlam all around the Command Floor. “Not now . . . not at a time like this. What the hell can anyone do about it with all this going on?”

  “You’ve got to find her,” Laura pleaded. “She’s part of your team. You brought her up here and she’s sick. She could walk into anything.” Chris and Ron had overheard and moved closer to listen.