“Try tracking her viewpad ID code,” Chris suggested. “She’s probably still carrying it.” Dyer spun abruptly and strode across to where Eric Jassic was supervising operations at one of the master communications consoles. When the others caught up with him he was already explaining what he wanted.
“That’s a privacy violation,” Jassic said dubiously. “Needs okaying by Krantz.”
“Eric, so help me, I’ll break your neck,” Dyer grated. “Just do it!” Jassic glanced up, read the look in Dyer’s eyes and began hammering commands into his console without further ado.
“She’s in a cab,” he told them a few seconds later. “Heading west between Downtown and Paris. It’s logged the fermentation plant at Vine County as its destination.”
“What the hell would she do there?” Ron asked in astonishment. Nobody knew.
Dyer called the provost marshal who in turn alerted his men in Vine County to intercept the cab on arrival. Many minutes passed while the group around the console followed the cab’s progress. It was agonizingly slow. For some insane reason Kim was stopping at practically every point in between, but she didn’t get out. At last the data on the screen told them she had arrived at the fermentation plant. They waited anxiously for the call to come through on one of the auxiliary screens. At last the tone sounded and a few seconds later a puzzled provost was staring out at them.
“This some kinda joke or sump’n?” he demanded.
“What?” Dyer asked.
“There ain’t nobody in this cab. There’s just somebody’s pad on one of the seats. You people tryin’ ta make monkeys out of us here or sump’n?”
“Sorry . . . it must have been . . . a mistake.” Dyer cut off the screen and turned back to the stupefied faces behind him. “She guessed. It was just a decoy. She could be anywhere by now.”
“She might be sick but she’s still got her head screwed on okay,” Laura said. “Ray, we have to do something.”
“What the hell are we supposed to do?” Dyer demanded. “We’ve got a crazy computer making missiles, the roof could fall in any second, and nobody knows if we can get out or not. She could be anywhere in this mess. There simply isn’t—” At that moment the emergency tone sounded shrilly from Chris’s viewpad. Chris slipped it from his pocket and frowned as he interrogated the screen.
“Bloody hell!” he exclaimed suddenly. “This isn’t true.”
“What is it?” Ron asked.
“My apartment in Berlin,” Chris said. “The intruder alarm’s been triggered. Somebody’s breaking in!”
“That couldn’t be Kim, could it?” Laura asked, sounding amazed and perplexed.
Chris tapped in the codes to connect the cameras in his apartment to the screen of the viewpad. The camera in the hall had been put out of action already by whoever had broken in, but another by the back door tantalized by showing the shadow of somebody moving behind a projecting corner in the wall without revealing who the somebody was. Ron looked over Chris’s shoulder and watched thoughtfully. Then he snapped his fingers.
“That is Kim,” he said quietly. “She’s after the Gremlin.” Chris looked up at him, horrified.
“What Gremlin?” Dyer asked them.
“It’s too long a story to go into now,” Ron said. “There’s a Gremlin there—sighter plus projectiles. Kim’s the only other person who knows about it. That has to be her.”
“What’s she going to do with it?” Laura asked.
Ron shrugged. “Search me. The state she’s in, it could be anything.”
One of the console operators, a freckle-faced girl who had been standing on the fringe of the group of people nearby, moved forward a pace to speak to them.
“Excuse me. I couldn’t help hearing some of the things you’ve been saying. Are you looking for Kimberly Sinclair?”
“Yes,” Dyer said. “Why?”
“She was here earlier.”
“How d’you mean, ‘here’? Where?”
The girl gestured vaguely around.
“Here . . . in the Command Room. She was standing next to me right over there by the stairs when everybody was watching the shuttle leaving Northport . . . when the missile nearly got it. She didn’t seem well at all. I was wondering if I should say anything to anybody.”
“Well, we think we know where she is now,” Dyer told her. “Thanks anyway.”
“She was talking kind of strange,” the girl went on, evidently unhappy about leaving it at that. “She was there until Mr. Krantz and General Linsay started talking about what to do next. She said something about if nobody else could make up their minds how to stop it, she would. Then she took off.”
“She didn’t say anything else?” Dyer asked.
“No . . . I don’t think so . . . nothing that made much sense, anyway. Something about breaking it off and putting it where the missiles could tear it apart.”
“Oh God!” Ron’s face turned a shade paler. He looked woodenly at Chris. “Do you think it could be what I think it could be?”
Chris stared back at him blankly for a second, then his jaw dropped. “Mat Solinsky . . . the grand tour . . . the view from the window?”
Ron nodded.
“What are you two talking about?” Dyer asked them.
“We think she’s going to the Hub,” Chris said. “She’s going to try jamming up the Spin Decoupler by putting a Gremlin into it . . . If it does, it’ll tear Janus in half. We’ll all be in one half and Spartacus will be on its own in the other. Then the ISA ships can finish it off. That’s what she’s doing.”
Dyer closed his eyes for a moment while he struggled to digest what he had just heard. He looked from Chris to Ron and shook his head in protest.
“But that’s insanity,” he said. “It couldn’t break off clean . . . not with being locked solid that far off-center. The whole southern half of Janus would wheel around and smash the Rim into scrap metal. Pittsburgh and Detroit would plow straight through this place like an eggshell.”
“I know that and you know that,” Ron agreed soberly. “But maybe Kim isn’t in any state of mind to worry about that kind of risk right now. There’s only one thing she cares about, and that’s stopping Spartacus. I don’t think she’s bothered how she does it.”
CHAPTER THIRTY-EIGHT
Spartacus followed up its stab at the shuttle with a full-scale assault aimed at getting into the Hub, both by pushing northward out of the Spindle and by breaking in from the outside. It brought its full complement of new weapons to bear, including cannon-firing and flame-throwing spacedrones and self-propelled bombs, but the defending troops were prepared for depressurization and faced the assault wearing suits and well entrenched behind formidable walls of rocket launchers and automatic weapons. The battle developed into an ebb and flow concentrated mainly around the region where the Hub joined the Spindle and around the vicinity of Northport.
Somebody in the Hub had the idea of loading some of the cabs with explosives and dispatching them down the tubes through the Spindle into Detroit, in hopes of an explosion somewhere deep inside Spartacus’s vitals. Some of the cabs never made it and nobody was sure exactly where the others were when they detonated, but not long afterward the vigor of Spartacus’s attack slackened considerably. A counterthrust developed from this point with spacesuited infantry regaining a number of positions in the Hub-Spindle junction; at the same time a swarm of bugs that had been specially rigged to fire rockets and Gremlins went out to deal with the machines attempting to work inward from the outside. In some places troops emerged onto the outside surface to add further pressure.
The tide turned once more when Spartacus’s ‘Mark I’ missiles proved lethal for bugs and its space drones took out the infantry, who had no equivalent weapon of their own to counter them and were soon forced back inside. When a lull at last developed, the soldiers were still holding the exits from the Spindle but Spartacus had gained sole ownership of the outside.
By this time most of the Hub was a mess. Its su
rface was pitted with jagged holes and most of its outer sections were depressurized. Several of the Hub backup stations had been knocked out during the fighting, leaving many units to maintain their vigils by the ghostly glare of portable searchlights, without transportation and in some cases with only hastily laid field telephones for communication. Evacuation under those conditions would have been impossible and all personnel who were not directly involved in the military operations being conducted at the Hub began moving down to the Rim.
Throughout all this, Dyer had been totally preoccupied with digesting the reports coming in and endeavoring to form a picture of what kind of processes were developing inside Spartacus from the tactics that it employed. When things calmed down again he returned his attention to his immediate surroundings and looked around for Laura, Chris and Ron. There was no sign of them. He descended from the dais and went across to where Jassic was still sitting.
“They went after Kim,” Jassic told him. “I tried to talk to them but things were too hectic. They figured you’d be tied up for too long up there and said there wasn’t time to wait.”
“Don’t they know there’s a war on at the Hub?” Dyer stormed.
“They said you’d understand. Chris said they were heading for the Maintenance & Spares Unit in Section 17D. They seemed sure that’s where Kim would be.”
“Get me a connection to somebody there,” Dyer said.
“I already tried to. Comms there are out. The backup station got bombed.”
Dyer swore in exasperation and drove a fist into his palm. He turned around to look back at the dais and saw Linsay and Krantz still debating hotly. Linsay was in favor of launching another thrust into the Spindle to follow up on the blow dealt by the cab bombs while the advantage lasted; Krantz wanted to disperse the lower shield and plan for an evacuation through the Rim. Dyer swore again. Even if he told them about Kim and the Spin Decoupler now, they’d do nothing but talk until it was too late. There wasn’t time. He swung back toward Jassic, who was watching him expectantly.
“If anybody wants me I’ve gone to the Hub,” Dyer said. “There’s nothing left to do down here anyhow. It’s all soldiers’ work now.”
He left the Command Room, stopped in the lobby outside to put on his helmet and combat overjacket and pick up an M25, and walked through from the Data Executive Sector into the concourse to catch an elevator for the Hub.
Minutes after Dyer left the Command Room, news of fresh activity on the outside of Detroit came through from the two remaining ISA ships. For some time Spartacus had been enlarging one of the holes it had cut in a position south of Detroit’s equator and thus invisible from the Hub and the observation points at the intersections of the spokes with the Rim. Something was coming out.
Roughly cylindrical, over twenty-five feet long and thin for much of its length, the construction was adorned with a profusion of disks and flat cylinders mounted around and perpendicular to its main axis, with tangles of cables and what appeared to be dense electrical windings at places in between. Seemingly haphazard jumbles of unidentifiable equipment clung around both ends in heaps with the back end, assuming that that was the part that came out last, considerably more heavily loaded than the front. It lifted away from Detroit and began sailing outward on a course that would bring it around the Rim. Three more followed in rapid succession and spread out to space themselves equally about the main axis of Janus.
Then the two hippos detached themselves from Southport, reversed, and began swinging outward to traverse the length of the Spindle.
Krantz was well beyond curiosity by now and called for an immediate missile strike by the two remaining ISA ships. Six missiles were fired within seconds. Four went out of control and careered off into space, and the other two exploded prematurely, far short of effective range from their targets. The salvo of twelve missiles that followed claimed one of the mysterious devices, with seven attacks going off course and four detonating early. Krantz promptly called for another strike.
Command Stalley, senior officer aboard the remaining “Watchdog” ships, looked gravely back at him from one of the screens.
“We’ve only got fifteen missiles left. We didn’t come here expecting to have to fight a full-scale war. On top of that we’re a ship short because one’s gone to take care of the shuttle.”
“What’s going wrong with the ones you’re firing?” Krantz demanded.
“We don’t know yet. We’re still analyzing the data from the tracking instruments.”
“When is Miller due to arrive with Z Squadron?” Krantz asked, referring to the five fast ISA ships that had been dispatched from Earth as soon as the situation on Janus began getting out of hand.
“Three and a half hours. Until then we’re down to fifteen. You want us to risk all of them now?” A short pause ensued while Krantz wrestled with the question. The two hippos from Southport were now abreast of Pittsburgh and still moving outward from the axis. Then Stalley spoke again.
“Tracker analysis report’s just come in. Every one of the missiles exhibited high X-ray emission immediately before it went haywire. Those things that Spartacus has launched must be something like flying linear bevatrons—high-power electron guns. It’s using our missiles as targets for an enormous X-ray tube and knocking them out with their own emitted radiation!”
At that moment a third hippo came out of Southport and formed up with two more electron guns and a swarm of space drones into a second fleet that began moving in the same direction as the first, which was now opposite Detroit and almost out as far as the inner reflector ring.
“We may not have three and a half hours,” Krantz shouted at the screen. “Fire everything you’ve got now.”
“Okay. As soon as we’ve reloaded and armed.”
“How long?” Krantz implored.
“A minute maybe, but those hippos are slow.”
Krantz nodded resignedly and turned away from the screen to find Linsay stooping to unlock the door in the plinth supporting his own console. When Linsay stood up he was buckling a pair of Patton-style pearl-handled revolvers around his waist; then he stooped again and took out a brilliantly polished white helmet that bore his general’s insignia. There was a strange light in his eyes.
“What are you doing?” Krantz asked.
“Can’t you see what’s happening?” Linsay replied. “It’s about to mount an all-out attack on Northport. If it gets in, we lose the Hub. If we lose the Hub, our only chance of getting back in to Detroit will be gone. Detroit must be attacked while we still have a chance. This time it mustn’t fail. I intend going there and leading it personally.”
“We still hold the Rim,” Krantz pointed out. “Even without the Hub there would—”
“For how long?” Linsay asked. “Is that how you want it to end . . . with us cooped up in the Rim like rabbits chased down a hole by a ferret? If we get pushed back to the Rim there will be no way out.”
“We can disperse the shield,” Krantz said.
“Not anymore. Can’t you see . . . it’s only a matter of time now before Spartacus turns those beams onto the outer skin! The shield would absorb the X-rays but without the shield we’d all be fried like germs—sterilized, like bacteria! We can’t disperse the shield now. Our only way out is to Detroit. That way we might win or we might die. Here we can only die.”
Linsay stepped down from the dais and walked over to his staff officers to detail his second-in-command to take over and to select a handful of aides to go with him to the Hub. They departed a few minutes later.
Up on the dais Krantz found that his mouth was dry and his hands were trembling. He looked at the notepad in front of him and realized that he had been scrawling on the paper unconsciously. Scattered across the top sheet were copies of the same symbol repeated over and over again. It was the symbol of the final letter of the Greek alphabet—Omega.
CHAPTER THIRTY-NINE
The arrivals concourse at the Hub end of the Berlin spoke was a scene of bustling a
ctivity when Kim emerged from one of the elevators. Busy medical orderlies were fussing over rows of stretchers waiting their turn to be moved down to the Rim while behind them the walking wounded were sitting and standing in weary, battle-stained groups, smoking cigarettes and watching the companies of freshly arrived troops and ammunition parties passing through on their way to the fronts.
She had been informed at the departure point in Berlin that standing orders required everybody bound for the Hub to be kitted out in suits, but that face visors could be left open in the areas that were still pressurized. When she arrived, therefore, there was nothing in particular to single her out from anybody else; besides that, everybody was too busy to take much notice of her. Carrying the conspicuous aluminum sighter case concealed inside a standard-issue plasticized storage bag intended to hold a laser range-finder, she worked her way through the confusion toward the south exit.
The soldiers preparing fallback positions at the lower end of the corridor that rose away toward the Spindle followed her with a few curious looks as she passed, but made no attempt to stop her. Farther on, a hole blown through the floor was being improvised into a fortified destroyer-control position and a sandbagged machine gun was covering the stretch ahead from behind a bulkhead door. At the far end of the corridor, where it transformed into a staircase to complete its steepest part, a squad of marines was positioned to cover the closed door that led onward. One of them moved into the center of the corridor and beckoned Kim to a halt as she approached.
“It’s depressurized beyond this point, ma’am,” he told her. “You sure you’re going the right way?”
“What’s the situation in 17D?” she inquired.
“We’ve got some forward units stationed there, that’s all. Forward observation.”
“It’s still ours then,” Kim said with a quick surge of inward relief. “How do I get through? I need to get in there.”
The marine looked at her curiously. “Do you know it’s right on the outside? What do you need to go there for?”
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