Cyber Rogues

by James P. Hogan

  Linsay himself would be the first man out. After that, it would be straight through to the fusion plant without stopping, regardless of losses until they either got there or all died in the attempt. “If you’re hit, keep going,” he had told them. “If you can’t keep going, get outa the goddam way! Once we come out of the tank in Detroit, there won’t be any way back.”

  A naval captain staring out over the activity around the rafts shook his head wonderingly then turned to the major directing a welding team.

  “It’s the craziest thing I’ve ever seen in my whole life,” he declared. “In fact it’s so crazy, it might just damn well work!”

  At the far end of the Depot, Linsay was exhorting a sweating crew of engineers to move faster in fitting a bug main drive to the back of the large tank when a worried-looking sergeant bustled through from the communications post that had been set up alongside the tracks.

  “Message from the Command Room, sir. Spartacus has started landing drones on the outside of the Rim.”

  Linsay bunched his lips and drew a long breath.

  “They’ll just have to take care of it themselves now,” he said. “We need everybody we’ve got up here . . . and more.” He turned back toward the engineer team. “Come on, come on! Get that fuel line connected. What are you people waiting for—a pay raise? If that motor doesn’t fire on schedule you won’t be in any position to spend what you’re already getting. Move!”

  The Command Room was sealed off by the surrounding mass of Downtown from the falling pressure outside in the Rim, but everybody had donned suits as a precaution. Only a skeleton staff was left after everybody else had departed either to the shelters or to join Cordelle’s defense lines around the spokes.

  Krantz sat at the dais and took in the reports of growing numbers of drones and other contrivances arriving on the outer surface of the Rim. The pressure was now down to such a level that even a major fracture of the Rim would no longer have catastrophic consequences, although considerable damage could still be expected. Krantz was not so worried by the machines on the roof, therefore, as by those on the outer surface of the tread—below ground level, right where most of the people were. Anything could happen, he told himself repeatedly.

  And then the reports started coming through of cutting commencing at points beneath Downtown, Berlin and Paris. At the same time the machines were moving around toward the place where they had detected the greatest concentrations of mass. Krantz studied the data beamed in from the telescopic views picked up by the distant ISA ships and smiled to himself as the thought that had been lurking at the back of his mind began to take shape.

  “Give them a few more minutes,” he said in response to a request for instructions from one of the screens on his console.

  He had found sitting here while others fought and died to be more of a strain than he had bargained for. But although at times his emotions had almost taken control, he had managed, he felt, to maintain an acceptable degree of coordination and order in the face of impossible circumstances; now at last he could do something positive to contribute directly to slowing down that accursed machine until Linsay was ready and the Z Squadron arrived. He touched in a command to activate a channel to the controller in the emergency backup station some floors below.

  “Confirm status on dispersal firing circuit,” he said.

  “Ready and standing by,” came the reply. Krantz nodded and studied again the figures coming in from the image analyzers aboard the ISA ships.

  “Disperse the shield,” Krantz instructed.

  “Request confirmation to disperse the shield.”

  “Confirmed.”

  Thousands of explosive bolts detonated simultaneously all around the outside of the Rim to disintegrate the aluminum shell that retained the four-foot-thick moonrock layer of the cosmic-ray shield. The entire tread of the Rim turned into a cloud of metal shell-sections and dust expanding out into space like a gigantic smoke ring and carrying with it a complete division of Spartacus’s army.

  Krantz smiled grimly to himself at the image brought to him on the screen. Now he too had drawn blood from the monster. He felt composed. He could live even with the knowledge of Omega. Or die, if that was the way it was to be. But without having been granted even the dignity of making a token gesture of striking back . . . that would have been too much.

  CHAPTER FORTY-FIVE

  “Are you out of your mind?”

  “It’s a golden opportunity, I tell you.”

  “You’re crazy. Look, there’s absolutely no way I’m gonna—”

  “Shut up for one second. Look, everybody’s been—”

  “But it’s insane. You’re talking about—”

  “Shut up, please.”

  “But I tell ya—”

  “Shut up, Ron! Look, everybody’s been looking for ways into Detroit by taking it by storm, and here’s Spartacus presenting us with one that’s staring us right in the face. Spartacus might have the whole Hub to itself by now. If there’s any fighting still going on it’ll be behind us, so we can’t go back. Equally obviously, we can’t stay here forever. Logically that only leaves one possibility and that’s forward. You can’t get away from it. So why not do it this way and maybe there’ll be a chance to do something really useful if we do get inside. How many times in history has a small unit, moving fast and under cover, got in and done the job when a whole army was bogged down?”

  They were lying side by side squeezed into a narrow space beneath the mounting base of a large transformer that fed part of the subway system. The transformer was built, along with some other equipment, in a tight recess that opened out into a darkened section of subway tunnel. By the dim light coming from farther along, they could see the vague outlines of the procession of mangled cabs, smashed machinery, dismantled structural units and all manner of assorted objects moving slowly by on the dragline that was hauling them southward into the Spindle.

  After the attack on 17D, the soldiers had fallen back deeper into the Hub in a series of well-rehearsed and speedily executed leap-frogging moves and the attack had ground to a halt against the solid defensive positions prepared behind them. But Chris and Ron, not having been involved in such rehearsals, had found themselves left behind after getting off the catwalk and very soon they were cut off completely in the no-man’s-land of the south Hub. After lying low for about thirty minutes in a burned-out gas holder, they had emerged to find that the tide of battle had flowed elsewhere. But they had lost their bearings in the jungle of shadows and forms, none of which bore any recognizable relationship to the neatly labeled models they had memorized at Fort Vokes.

  Moving slowly and carefully, they had worked their way upward toward the core, which was the only direction that they could identify consistently. After a couple of close shaves with work details of machines busily tidying up parts of the mess and installing new extensions of the Spartacus system, they had eventually arrived at a large open space which they recognized as the freight-distribution point where manufactured items coming through from Detroit had once been sorted and sent on to their various destinations around Janus. That meant they were almost at the axis and not far from where the Spindle and the Hub met.

  But the traffic was all moving the wrong way. Machines were bringing in all manner of scrap and attaching it to draglines to be hauled southward, presumably because powered transportation had not yet been restored in that area after the fighting that had been flowing back and forth between the Hub and the Spindle. Chris had made a guess at what was happening—Spartacus, running short of raw material, was organizing scavenger units to send back anything that could be turned into something useful. Probably the stream flowed all the way back down to Pittsburgh for remelting and processing.

  Clearly they couldn’t go on into the freight-distribution area, which was swarming with drones and machines. They tried to work their way past it beneath a section of floor, but found themselves being forced steadily farther around to the south instead of n
orthward as they had intended. Eventually they had come out into the core again at the transformer beneath which they were now still lying, looking directly out into what appeared to be Spartacus’s main through line to Pittsburgh.

  Then Chris had had his great idea. The stream of scrap for recycling almost certainly flowed straight through the core of Detroit, right at the heart of the enemy stronghold. There, staring them in the face, was a free ride to within a few dozen feet of where the fusion plant was located.

  They had been arguing about it ever since.

  In the end Ron gave in. They wriggled out to the edge of the transformer pit and waited for a fairly intact cab to appear upstream in the slowly lurching line. Then as it came abreast of them they threw themselves across the four-foot gap that separated it from the floor of the transformer pit, and they landed in a tangled heap down between where the seats had once been.

  “Keep down and stay away from the windows,” Chris warned. “There’s a bright part coming up just ahead.”

  “Hey, this thing’s full of bits of junk,” Ron said. “I feel like I’m sitting inside a scrap heap.”

  “Complain to the management about it when we get off.”

  Ron’s beard shook from side to side behind his visor. “What a hell of a way to run a railroad,” he muttered.

  Dyer reached out ahead of him and grasped the jagged edge where the lip of the Spin Decoupler ring had been blown away by the Gremlin. He hauled himself closer until he could hook an arm around part of the ruptured outer skin, freed his foot from the tear in which he had wedged it, and brought his leg forward to curl it around the edge of the gaping hole in the surface that formed the immense roof sweeping away on every side above him. Even though his weight was almost negligible this close to the axis, he still retained the distinct slothlike feeling that he had developed in the course of the long climb along the Spindle. At last he rolled himself up and into the hole to lie in a normal position on the inner surface, then sat up and fastened the loop tied in the safety line around a length of projecting spar.

  “Okay,” he said. “I’m in. You can unhitch and move whenever you like.”

  He had left Laura hanging below the roof thirty feet back, secured to—of all things—the base of one of the tripod legs that supported some kind of instrument that Spartacus had erected. Dyer hadn’t seen the thing until he was nearly next to it, by which time he realized that whatever it was had been built to look up off the surface and not down at it, and thus couldn’t see him. It had made as good a belay as any, and besides, there had been nothing else handy in the vicinity.

  “Okay, I’m unhitched,” Laura’s voice said in his helmet. “I’m not sorry to get away from this thing either. It gives me the creeps.” Dyer smiled faintly and settled back to take in the slack of the line as she climbed across toward him.

  The haul up from 17D had been tedious and nerve-racking, but it had gone without incident. Using the scars of battle damage left upon Janus’s skin or, where no readymade holes presented themselves, bolts that Dyer jammed into holes that he made with a spring-loaded punch taken from the bug’s tool kit, they had worked their way up over the monstrous sweeping curve of the Hub and along the roof of the Spindle to the Decoupler. They had moved singly, with one of them anchored to the structure while the other climbed at the far end of the line.

  At one point, when they were nearly at the Spindle, they had watched a lot of Spartacus-controlled traffic moving outward and landing on the Rim. Not long afterward the shield had suddenly broken up and expanded away into space in a spectacular shower of metal and dust as witnessed from their unique vantage point. Apart from that, all had been fairly quiet. Numerous gadgets still hung in the blackness below them between the Hub and Detroit, and others had scuttled back and forth in one direction or another, but none of them had interfered with the two tiny specks clawing their way upward through the ink-black shadow that engulfed the south side of the Hub.

  “I’m at the bolt with the wire loop hanging from it,” Laura’s voice said. “Where do I go now?”

  “Are you on the loop?”

  “Yes. I’ve got a foot wedged between the two long bolts.”

  “Let your foot slip out. Swing on the loop like a pendulum and stretch out right ahead of you as you come up the other side. There’s a groove you can jam your fist in. Then let go of the loop and try and wriggle a toe through it. Once you’re there you’ll only have about ten more feet to go.”

  A few minutes later she was beside him looking up into the chasm that the Gremlin had made into the Decoupler. Strictly speaking, they were looking into only half of the chasm since the irregular hole terminated abruptly against the smooth wall formed by the south half of the Decoupler system; the other part of the hole was somewhere else as a result of remaining still while they were carried around along with the northern part of Janus. Once every revolution the two parts of the hole were aligned as they had been at the instant the Gremlin struck.

  Above them the structure of the outer ring appeared badly damaged but beyond that they could see the enormous windings and magnetic pole pieces that encased the inner ring. And all up one side of the hole, the unbroken wall of the southern half of the Decoupler slid endlessly by. Laura became conscious for the first time that the whole structure around them was pulsating incessantly with throbs from the very heart of the Spindle, as if some unimaginable force were straining to break free from the clutches of titanic counter-forces fighting to hold them in check.

  “What you’re looking up into is part of the Magnetic Balancing System,” Dyer said. “The two halves of Janus are coupled by a system of complex magnetic fields across the gap between the two disks of the Decoupler. The field strengths are altered dynamically to compensate for any imbalance forces that arise from masses being redistributed around Janus, for example when things move around the Rim or inside Pittsburgh or Detroit.”

  “You mean something like an automobile wheel being out of balance?” Laura asked.

  “Right. An unbalanced wheel vibrates. What’s supposed to happen here is that sensors monitor the vibration forces from instant to instant and modulate the magnetic coupling fields to just cancel them out. So you end up with a nice smooth rotation.”

  “It doesn’t feel very smooth to me,” Laura commented.

  “It’s not. Something’s screwed it. That Gremlin Kim put into it can’t have done much good. In fact I’m surprised the vibration’s not worse. I’ve been watching the inner ring yokes up there while I was waiting. The alignment’s all gone to hell. By my reckoning it shouldn’t be holding together at all. It just doesn’t seem possible.”

  “You mean this whole thing could come apart any second?”

  “I reckon it already should have.”

  Laura digested the information while she checked over the items of equipment that she had brought with her to make sure they were all still there. The vibration in the structure around them suddenly started growing more intense and proceeded to increase rapidly. Dyer caught Laura’s arm to attract her attention and pointed at the moving face of the south disk of the Decoupler.

  “Watch now,” he said.

  As the shaking rose to a crescendo, a jagged edge appeared suddenly from behind where part of the north disk had been blown away. The other part of the hole had completed another revolution, Laura realized, and was coming into line once more with the part they were sitting in. The gap widened at a rate of one and a half feet per second until the gash matched through both disks and for a few seconds uncovered a direct opening through into the southern part of the Spindle. The part of the south disk that was now visible, together with much of the reinforcing structures and windings exposed behind it, had been hideously deformed by the Gremlin and in places whole structures were buckled and writhing as they scraped against damaged members protruding across from the north side of the gap. That accounted for the buildup in vibration at this point in the rotation cycle. And then the trailing edge of the south-disk
hole moved into view and the way through into south Spindle started to close up again. In six seconds it had gone. The gash in the north disk was once again blocked by a smooth sliding wall and gradually the vibration returned to its former level.

  “That’s where we have to get through next time it comes around,” Dyer said. “I’ve been timing it. The gap lasts for about thirteen seconds, but it’s only wide enough to clear for five, maybe six. At this gravity, a good strong jump off this girder should take you straight up and through without any problem. We’ll have to go together in tandem. I’ll go first. As soon as I jump wait one second, no more, then go. Make sure you’re not trailing any gear that could get fouled up on the sides. Okay?”

  Laura felt cold fingers running loose up and down her spine. She swallowed hard and fought down the part of her that wanted to forget the whole thing and settle for a peaceful end to it all out here amid the tranquility of the stars. Dyer had already moved up onto the girder and was standing waiting with his back to her and his arms braced across two struts to give him a firm push-off. As she stepped carefully up to stand behind him, she had to make an effort to thrust out of her mind the images that were trying to form of a writhing body being mashed into pulp between the relentless jagged scissor edges gouged in the Decoupler disks. Dyer sensed the meaning of her silence and started talking again to stop her apprehensions from taking root.