Cyber Rogues

by James P. Hogan

  “The computers that control the magnetic system were supposed to be connected through to Phase III of Icarus, which never got built. But the conduit to carry the connections was installed somewhere just inside the south Decoupler disk. It forms an offshoot from the main tube we’re trying to get into and I’m pretty sure it ends somewhere out near the edge of the disk. With luck we could find we’re not far away from it when we get through. That all depends where it was when Kim fired. At any rate, the branch comes out into the dead-end area here near the edge of the disk and I’m hoping Spartacus won’t have been too active around there.”

  The vibration began building up again.

  “Here it comes,” Dyer said. “Remember that what you land in will be moving relative to what you’re standing on now. As you jump, twist so your feet point to the left. You’ll be landing at about ten miles an hour.” The edge came into sight and the breach began opening again. “Ready?”

  “Okay . . . Boy, is Zeegram gonna hear about this!”

  Dyer waited until the breach was a couple of feet short of its maximum width and then hurled himself forward and upward with simultaneous thrusts of his arms and legs. The jaws sailed past on either side of him, at the same time turning as his body pivoted slowly to bring his feet around. Shadow enveloped him and his feet struck hard onto something solid. He shot out an arm blindly. It hooked into something and in an instant he had checked his flight and spun himself around into a firm position around a bar. The breach was at maximum and already starting to close, but Laura wasn’t through. He could see her sailing toward it on the opposite side. Too slow! She was moving too slow! The wheeling of her body and the trailing leg told him in the same split second that her foot must have slipped as she launched off. He stretched out his arms to grasp the line that still connected them together and heaved with every ounce of strength he could muster. Laura may have weighed only a few pounds, but that didn’t change her body’s inertia.

  She flew through in a flurry of arms and legs and was sent spinning as one of the closing jaws caught her boot. A second later she crashed to a halt in Dyer’s waiting outstretched arm. A gasp of suddenly expelled breath came through in his helmet, followed by sounds of heaving and panting.

  “Are you hurt?” he asked anxiously.

  “Jeez . . . gimme a second . . . no, I think I’m okay. Maybe I don’t wanna be a scientist after all.”

  “You’ll never make the Bolshoi with that act.”

  “Maybe the circus could use a new clown.”

  “Sure nothing hurts?”

  “No, I’m okay. Just a bit winded.”

  “Let’s go then.”

  They had shed the rotational motion of North Janus and were in free-fall. After some searching around, Dyer recognized a gallery that led to the area where the Decoupler computers were situated and near which the branch conduit from the main shaft terminated.

  They were almost at the door that led into the computer room when Dyer suddenly shoved Laura hard against the wall behind a projecting corner and cannoned in behind her.

  “What?” she whispered.

  “Take a look. Careful.”

  Laura inched her head forward to peer around and along the corridor, then jerked it back quickly. A sphere drone, a flame thrower and an armored cannon were hovering in a tight cluster immediately outside the computer-room door, apparently preoccupied with something inside it. Somehow they seemed to be watching something rather than threatening.

  “They weren’t looking this way,” Dyer said. “They didn’t see us.”

  “So what now?” Laura fingered the M25 that she was holding. “I’m game if you are.”

  “No,” Dyer said. “We’ve only got feet to go now. Even if we knocked out all three of them the cavalry would be here in no time. The conduit comes out in a sealed-off shaft set back from this side of the corridor.” He pointed to a hatch in the wall back along from the corner where they were standing. “We can probably get into the shaft around the back way and through there. Take a wrench and help me get those nuts off.”

  He was right. Minutes later they were inside the shaft. The conduit cover had not been disturbed and soon they were squeezing along inside the narrow tube that pointed toward the axis. Almost a hundred feet farther on, the tube came out into a wider shaft that ran north-south. It was quite empty and when Dyer extinguished his lamp no telltale patches of light that would have told of the shaft having been opened were visible in either direction.

  “This is it,” Dyer said. “So far it looks good. From here on we start moving one at a time again. I cut this line to be exactly fifty feet long. You keep one end steady while I move on one length, then you move up and we’ll repeat the routine again. Nine hundred fifty feet should put us right under the fusion plant.”

  CHAPTER FORTY-SIX

  The cab hulk lurched to a halt soon after it had been transferred through the Sleeve, which meant they were just inside the south Spindle. A long time seemed to go by without anything happening.

  “Reckon I ought to risk a look?” Chris asked eventually.

  “Yeah. What the hell?”

  Chris eased himself up from the darkness of the stripped-out interior below the level of the window and peeped around the edge into the dimly lit space that now surrounded them.

  “Christ!” He recoiled at once and pulled himself back down next to Ron.

  “What?”

  “There’s a flying lobster or something right outside. It looks as if it’s unhooking everything from the dragline. It was moving straight at us.”

  Even as he spoke the cab jolted slightly and tremors through the floor told them something was moving just outside. After a few seconds the tremors stopped and they could feel only the throbbing of the whole structure, which had been building up for some time as they drew nearer to the Decoupler.

  “The thing must have moved on down the line,” Ron said after a while.

  “I’ll try another look.”

  Chris moved back up and this time stayed there to survey their surroundings.

  “We’ve got to get out,” he announced.

  “Why?”

  “We’re in Spartacus’s scrap yard. There are heaps of rubbish floating all over the place. It’s all being cut up into small pieces farther ahead. Spartacus must be using the recycling conveyor from Detroit to Pittsburgh farther south. If we wait until it’s our turn, we’ll be right at the center of where all the attention is. Right now we’re near the back. The lobster’s shoved off and I can’t see anything else around.”

  “Where to?” Ron asked.

  “Dunno. Out of this place for a start. Then we’ll have to look around for some other way south.”

  “Next time you take it into your head to go for a ride, maybe we’ll take separate cabs,” Ron muttered as he untangled himself from the debris farther back inside.

  Using pieces of wreckage as camouflage, they drifted slowly toward one of the walls and left the scrap yard through a web of struts and girders that brought them to a shaft buried behind a wall of piping and machinery. They tried several approaches to move on along the core, but the area they were in was the focal point of all traffic moving between the north and south parts of the Spindle; there was simply too much activity all around them to risk breaking cover. Every attempt ended in their being forced back to the shaft.

  “It’s no good,” Ron said after their third try. “There’s no way out of here that leads south. We’ll have to take this shaft.”

  “That goes back toward the outside,” Chris objected. “We don’t want to go that way.”

  “It’s the only way we can go,” Ron insisted. “Look, you wanna get into Detroit, right? Well, we can’t get there along the core from here. It’s like Times Square out there. But the shaft goes outward just south of the Decoupler. It might be quieter near the edge. Maybe we could follow the edge south for a while, and then maybe work back in when we’re nearer Detroit.”

  This time Chris gave in, and
they entered the shaft and began moving outward along the inside face of the south disk of the Decoupler. They had lost track of distance when they came to a point where the shaft was blocked by some unidentifiable machinery that looked as if it had been installed by Spartacus. There was no choice but to back up to the last exit hatch they had passed and leave the shaft there.

  They were in a huge curved chamber that was evidently part of a larger circular structure encompassing the whole Spindle immediately south of the Decoupler. Batteries of enormous magnetic windings interspersed with massive yokes, bewildering arrays of insulator mountings and superconducting busbars marched away and around and out of sight in both directions. Next to them, looking out over the panorama through a viewing window, was a local control backup point with deserted consoles whose indicator lamps and displays were still glowing.

  “We’re at the inner ring of the Decoupler,” Ron said needlessly. “This is part of the Magnetic Balancing System.”

  “It’s in trouble too,” Chris answered. “Feel it? This is where the vibration’s been coming from. Look at the clearances over there. It’s all gone to cock.”

  “Musta been Kim.”

  “No, there’s something wrong. Provided it didn’t jam up solid, which it didn’t, the computers should be able to compensate even if part of the outer ring’s gone. Obviously they’re not—not very well anyway. They must have been knocked out.”

  “There hasn’t been any action here.”

  “Something’s not right.”

  A row of bright-red lights glowing inside the backup point caught Chris’s eye. He motioned for Ron to follow and moved in to study them more closely. Frowning, he turned to one of the consoles and tried tapping in a code for a status summary and, much to his surprise, got one.

  “You’re crazy,” Ron told him, “Spartacus might be wired into that by now. If it senses input from that it’ll know there’s somebody in here.”

  Chris didn’t seem to hear. He studied the panel again and brought more data plus a set of trend curves up onto the screen. Suddenly he seemed to have lost all interest in getting farther south toward Detroit.

  “Not very long from now, Ron, it won’t make any difference what Spartacus knows about,” he said at last. “Janus isn’t far off breaking up.”

  “What are you talking about?”

  Chris waved up at the red indicators.

  “They’re all way past danger levels. It’s been getting worse for over an hour and it’s not far off the point where the whole shooting match will shake itself to pieces. The compensating system isn’t running. Spartacus must have switched it off somehow when it went on strike.”

  “That’s ridiculous,” Ron protested. “If the compensating system was down, the Decoupler would have come apart as soon as the Gremlin hit the outer ring.”

  “I know, but it hasn’t and the compensator system isn’t running. Something else must be holding it instead.”

  “Like what?”

  “I don’t know. It won’t hold for much longer, though. This is serious, Ron. We’ve got to get that system up again quick. To hell with whether Spartacus finds out we’re here or not. We’ll all go up the same creek together anyway if we leave it.”

  “Figure we could do it from there?” Ron sounded dubious.

  Chris shook his head. “No. This is just a slave station. If my memory’s right though, the computer room that houses the compensator system should be right next to here.”

  “It is. It’s somewhere behind the bulkhead through that door out there,” Ron said, pointing. “We should come up right inside it.”

  Fifteen minutes later they were both working frantically at the master console inside the computer room. The data on the screens gradually pieced together to tell a strange story.

  The connections between the Magnetic Balancing System and the backup computers that were supposed to control it independently of Spartacus had been cut sometime before Kim had fired the Gremlin. Presumably this had occurred at the time Spartacus had embarked on its campaign of tearing out any cables it came across that didn’t serve parts of itself. After that event, continuing movements of objects around inside Janus had caused the imbalance forces to begin building up, but not to any alarming degree. All the same, the trends recorded showed that the vibrations had continued to increase slowly but surely. And then they had stabilized and started to reduce, albeit somewhat erratically. Since the backup computers were still disconnected at the time, that could only mean that some other influence had begun juggling the magnetic compensators in their place. That influence could only be Spartacus. It must have sensed the increasing instability of the structure around it, investigated, found the compensators and manufactured its own connections into the magnetic coupler system in an attempt to control it.

  Later, after Spartacus had secured full possession of the Spindle as far as the Hub and began asserting its presence throughout its domain, the backup computers had been integrated into its net. So they were indeed talking to something that was now part of Spartacus, which meant there was a high probability of Spartacus having realized already that they were there. There was no point in worrying about that now. They pressed on.

  The situation had persisted up to the moment when Kim fired the Gremlin. Immediately after that, an onset of huge vibrations had taken place as the condition of the Decoupler escalated to a whole new level of complexity. Spartacus had evidently been able to keep things reasonably steady up to that point, no doubt by pure trial and error without understanding what it was doing; but the combination of fluctuating and irregular forces that had suddenly appeared at that moment must have confused it totally. The trends recorded after the Gremlin impact all indicated that Janus should have come apart within twenty seconds. During that same period, Spartacus’s level of internal activity had risen to an unprecedented peak.

  Somehow, by a supercomputer effort, Spartacus had fought, nanosecond by nanosecond, and played the magnetic couplings to hold the rebelling Decoupler in check. And it had been holding it ever since. But it was slowly losing the battle. The vibration levels were increasing relentlessly and the latest figures showed that it would not be long before the loading limits on the structure were exceeded. When that point was reached, it would all be over.

  “I think I can see what’s happened,” Chris said after about a minute of silence. “The programs that were developed to control the balancing system contained all kinds of complex mathematical expressions to describe the total behavior of Janus as a self-contained system of electrodynamics and mechanics. Those programs are in this computer right here, but this computer isn’t connected to the system anymore. It’s only connected to some other piece of Spartacus. So the programs can’t drive the things they were supposed to drive. Spartacus is connected to the balancing system, but it’s trying to use its own homemade routines instead of the ones in here that were written to do the job and contain all the right mathematics.”

  Ron looked at him strangely, thought about it, and then nodded his head slowly.

  “Could be . . .” he murmured. “Could be . . . What you’re saying is, Spartacus hasn’t realized that there’s any connection between this computer, which it just sees as another machine that it found isolated and grabbed, and the job it’s trying to do to stop the vibrations. It doesn’t know that the routines it needs are in here.”

  “Right,” Chris said. “I bet its problem is that it doesn’t have enough comprehension yet of Janus as a totality in space. All it knew about until not very long ago was things that went on inside. But to work out the balancing equations correctly, it needs to know more about Janus as a whole. It managed a panic effort to stop the whole thing screwing up when Kim put the boot in, but things have been getting worse ever since. There must be too many variables and things building up to dangerous levels and it doesn’t understand enough yet to handle them.”

  “So, what can we do about it?”

  “Well, the equations it needs are in th
is machine, this machine’s connected to it, and it’s connected to where the programs can do some good. We’ll have to try telling it.”

  “Telling it? What are you gonna do, ask for an audience?”

  “All we can do is try using that,” Chris said, pointing at the console. “Attract its attention . . . input anything that it might relate to the problem—pictures, diagrams, anything.”

  “It doesn’t speak our language.”

  “There ought to be something we’ve got in common,” Chris insisted. “Think about how stupid this whole situation is. It’s trying to wipe us out and we’re trying to wipe it out. But if the Decoupler goes, we both go together anyway. We’ve got the knowledge to save us both and it’s got the means. Neither side can survive without the other. Why are we fighting each other at all?”

  Without further ado they got to work. Chris activated the console camera to transmit an image of both of them into whatever part of Spartacus the computer was connected to. Surely that would attract its attention if something else hadn’t already. Perhaps the act of deliberately announcing their presence would give it something to think about too. They created a schematic diagram of Janus, emphasizing the dynamics of the Decoupler, and sent that in as well. Then they extracted the key equations from the program residing inside the computer and copied those through with emphasis and more symbols and diagrams to signify their relevance.

  Chris was still hammering frantically at the console when a movement behind them caused Ron to swing around toward the door.

  “Forget it, Chris.” Ron’s voice was hoarse. “I guess it’s all over. The execution squad’s arrived.”

  Chris turned his head. A sphere drone was hovering high in the doorway with its lenses trained on them. Behind it an armored cannon was moving into a firing position while the evil snout of a flamethrower moved up to position itself alongside. Instinctively Ron began raising his rifle, but in the same instant he realized that it was useless. Without thinking why, he opened his arms slowly in a gesture of capitulation and allowed the rifle to tumble away across the room.