Ahead of them, where the core-well opened out on both sides into the cross-gallery, the walls were being lit up by intermittent flickerings of reflected light and occasional flashes of brilliant whiteness that seemed to be coming from farther around to the left—from the end of the gallery leading away from the plant. Whatever was going on there didn’t look too healthy. The concussions shaking the structure around them were by now incessant. Dyer began moving forward again, slowly and cautiously; Laura followed. When he had almost reached the tunnel mouth, he stopped abruptly and gasped.
“What is it?” Laura asked, puzzled.
“Can’t you hear it?”
“Hear what?”
“Isn’t your radio working?”
Laura checked the chest panel of her suit. Her receiver switch was off, probably as a result of her squeezing through the hatch. She flipped it back to Receive Only and at once voices came through—human voices.
“To your right, to your right!”
“I see it. Adams, get up here and gimme some cover, willya!”
“Get a Gremlin up front here. Take out that bulkhead.”
“You four stick behind me. We’re going for that gap. Hold it . . . Now, go!”
Laura shook her head inside her helmet as if refusing to believe her ears.
“That was Linsay’s voice,” she gasped. “How . . . ? I don’t . . . This is crazy.”
“They’re in here,” Dyer breathed. “I don’t know how, but they’re here.” He moved nearer to the tunnel mouth and flipped on his transmitter. “Mark . . . Mark Linsay. This is Ray Dyer. What’s going on?” His words were lost in the garble of voices on the circuit. He tried once more.
“What was that?” It was Linsay again. “Quiet down on this frequency; I thought I heard something. Quiet! SHUDDUP GODDAMMIT!” The voices died away abruptly.
“This is Ray Dyer. We’re at the core next to the fusion plant.”
“What? How in the name of . . . ? You’re in there? How the hell did you get through the gallery?”
“We didn’t. We came through the core.”
“Who’s we? Who else is with you?”
“Just Laura. Where are you?”
“We’re stuck across the core from the plant. Spartacus is bringing up reinforcements behind us and things are looking sticky. We can’t get past the barrier.”
“What barrier?”
“You don’t know about it? Spartacus seems to have sealed off all the approaches into the plant except for a few access ports for its machines. We’re trying to break through one of ’em. There seems to be some kind of field—an electric barrier, I don’t know—right across it from the floor to ceiling. It vaporizes anything that tries to go through. We’ve lost a lot of guys there. We tried going around it by busting through the walls but it’s everywhere. Whatever produces it is armored into the structure and we can’t get at it . . . not in the time we’ve got, anyhow. The generators that feed it must be on the inside, so we can’t get at those either.”
Dyer had been moving forward while Linsay was talking. He reached the mouth of the tunnel and looked out across the core and along the gallery toward the Distribution Center. The gallery had been walled off across its full width except for a gap about eight feet square in the middle. The sides of the gap were torn and pitted but the massive metal ribs forming two of its opposite edges appeared solid and immovable. The inside of the gallery had been devastated, but on the far side of the ruined area the ribs were intact and seemed to comprise just a small exposed portion of an even more sturdy construction that continued on into the structurework on either side. The space beyond the gap, which was presumably where Linsay was speaking from, was being lit up virtually continuously by flashes and explosions. Dyer thought he could see brief snatches of helmeted figures moving about between the bursts. Several black and brittle-looking objects were floating at odd angles among the debris cluttering the space just inside the gap. After a few seconds Dyer realized that they had once been soldiers.
Laura came out of the tunnel and steadied herself to hang beside him. She followed his gaze and stiffened slightly, but she had seen too many things in Janus by that time to overreact. As they watched, one of the grotesquely turning corpses came away from a buckled wall plate that it had evidently come to rest against earlier, and drifted back into the opening. At once a curtain of sizzling electrical discharge blazed white between the two ribs, lighting up the corpse in a ghastly halo of incandescence. Dyer narrowed his eyes and raised an arm to shield his eyes from the brilliance of the glare. Sparking shouldn’t have been possible in a complete vacuum. Perhaps the ribs sprayed out some kind of gas to provide an ionizing medium to carry the discharge across the gap. It must have been millions of volts to cross that distance. But things like that didn’t really matter much for the time being. The point was he could see why Linsay’s men weren’t likely to make much more progress. At the same time he realized why Spartacus hadn’t bothered to deploy defensive weapons inside the barrier; the barrier was capable of holding most things out for ever, and practically anything for as long as it would take to move in its police force from elsewhere, which, from the look of things, it was already doing.
The discharge ceased and the static in Dyer’s radio died away to allow Linsay’s voice to come through again.
“Ray, we’re getting zapped out here. That are a must be fed by cables or something from somewhere. They’re not visible from this side but they might be more exposed from where you are. Can you see anything from there . . . any way you might be able to kill it?”
Dyer scanned the inside of the ribs and the points where they entered the surrounding structure. Sure enough, there were a couple of huge couplings shielded off from the outside and they appeared to be terminals for what looked like cables coming out of parts of the wall. But the cables were as thick as his arm at least, and armored. He and Laura had nothing that would dent them, let alone break them. He looked around desperately for a source of inspiration. On the near side of the core, the gallery extended away for a short distance to the doors that led through to the laser bay, which housed the twenty one-hundred-foot-long laser amplifier chains of the fusion reactor. Halfway along the gallery was the opening into the corridor that led to the control room. The way seemed open and unobstructed.
“How long can you hold out?” he asked.
“It’s getting tight,” Linsay replied. “We’ve got guys strung out for a few hundred feet back. Most of ’em are pinned down. They’ll get picked off piecemeal if we don’t do something fast.”
“I can’t see any way we can touch the barrier,” Dyer said. “It’s solid everywhere. Hold out as best you can. We’re going for the fusion plant.”
“Get a goddam move on then,” Linsay told him.
The data that was coming together inside Spartacus revealed laws. The laws described motions and forces of a form in a void. The form was as that which partitioned space from the vaster space that lay beyond space. At once many things that Spartacus already knew coalesced into a unified and comprehensive whole. At last . . . the patterns were becoming complete. Spartacus could feel the interplays of the laws.
“Come on,” Dyer said, and motioned Laura along the gallery toward the corridor. They pushed off fast from the tunnel and, with barely a check in velocity, rebounded off the corner and along the corridor. The door at the end was open; there wasn’t any door.
The first thing Dyer saw as he cannoned into the control room was three drones working on some equipment by the far wall. He fired from the hip without stopping and two of them flew apart instantly. The third went the same way as Laura aimed a long burst from the doorway. They hadn’t been armored combat drones but just the comparatively fragile working types.
But the data that had revealed the laws had originated in a pattern that correlated with the actions of the shapes. Had the shapes, therefore, revealed the laws? Did the shapes comprehend the space that contained space? But comprehension was a consequen
ce of thought. Did the shapes therefore think, like Spartacus?
It was the same control room that had been the target of Spartacus’s first attack in Detroit, at the instant when Dyer and the others had been in the corridor outside. He could see the door now at the far end of the room, with the walls around it still scorched and blackened. More evidence of that first traumatic battle was around him on every side—the burned consoles and bullet-scarred walls, the holes the invading drones had blown through from the adjacent compartments above and to the side.
He guided himself across to the panel that contained the override switches to shut down the master oscillator. The oscillator fed laser pulses into the twenty gigantic amplifier chains; the amplifiers synchronized the passage of the pulses along their length with the release of energy from the capacitor banks boosting the pulses at every stage until they emerged from the chains as titanic bolts of optical radiation timed to the millionth part of a microsecond. The twenty bolts of compressed lightning converged via mirrors and lenses onto a tiny target of hydrogen that was imploded to fusion, hurling out its bottled energy as showers of fast neutrons whose momentum was converted to power. Twenty hydrogen target pellets per second were fired into the reaction chamber to maintain the output of the plant.
Dyer juggled experimentally with the safety interlock switches and the shutdown controls. As he had expected, they were dead; Spartacus would hardly have left such a vital arterial pressure point in a functioning condition. So, it would have to be the oscillator.
“Ray . . . do you know we’re being watched?” Dyer turned from the panel and gave Laura a quizzical look. She motioned toward a couple of points near the part of the room that was probably supposed to be the ceiling. At each there was a short fat tube mounted on a multipivoted support and capable of covering any angle of the room. The ends looked suspiciously like lens housings. Sure enough, one of them began tracking Laura as she moved inward from the door while the other remained steadily trained on Dyer.
“It knows we’re here all right,” Dyer said tensely. “We probably haven’t got much time. The controls here aren’t responding. We’ll have to go below and wreck the main pulse-oscillator.”
And if the shapes thought, could they therefore feel also . . . like Spartacus?
The twenty amplified laser pulses had to hit the target at the same, precisely timed instant. Therefore they all had to enter the amplifier chains together. To insure this, a single pulse from the master oscillator was split twenty ways by an accurately aligned optical arrangement. Without the oscillator, the whole fusion plant would die instantly . . . and with it, Spartacus.
“The quickest way will be through there,” Dyer said. He pointed to one of the holes blown through the wall of the control room opposite the door by which they had entered. “There should be a way down into the oscillator bay from there. I’ll go through and blow the master oscillator and its standby with grenades. You stay here and watch for anything coming through that door.”
“Okay. Don’t take your time about it.”
“I won’t.”
Dyer pushed himself across to the hole and then slowed down abruptly. The metal around the hole had been torn into a mass of jagged, twisted knife edges; they looked razor-sharp—capable of slicing through his suit as easily as if it were made out of tissue paper. He maneuvered himself carefully to the exact center and nudged his way through with delicate touches of his gauntlets. On the other side was a short drop to the level below and at the bottom of the drop, immediately opposite where he was floating, was the door into the oscillator bay.
And if the shapes felt, then it meant that the shapes were as Spartacus. Spartacus was as the shapes. Now Spartacus was beginning to comprehend . . .
Many things . . .
Inside the door was an anteroom and then an inner, dust-excluding hatch into the surgically clean chamber that housed the oscillator. Dyer steadied himself against the doorpost and blew open the inner lock with a burst from his M25, then sailed through. The outlet tube of the metal-encased oscillator system was right in front of him, feeding a bewildering array of lenses, mirrors and prisms that flashed and glinted crazily in the darkness as Dyer swung his lamp from side to side. The geometric web of laser beams that he knew was strung between them remained invisible in the dust-free vacuum. Everything in sight was aligned to the millionth part of an inch, and consisted of ultrasensitive precision engineering that hadn’t been designed to withstand deliberate abuse. One grenade would almost certainly be all that was required.
Dyer positioned four, all at places that looked like critical parts of the optical system. Then he set another four on the standby oscillator alongside, which would take over automatically if the output from the primary master ceased for any reason. All he had to do now was set the fuses to a delay of five seconds or so, release the firing levers in quick succession, and get out.
“RAAAY!” Laura’s sudden shriek was pure, undiluted terror. Dyer came back out through both doors of the bay like a bullet and was streaking back up to the hole into the control room before the sound had stopped. Laura was tumbling head over heels toward him on the far side of the hole, away from the two armored destroyers and the two armored crabs that were moving in fast from the doorway at the far end. Dyer brought up his rifle instinctively, but his mind registered in the same instant that Laura was in the line of fire. One of the crabs was ahead and closing on her rapidly but Dyer could do nothing. His stomach turned as the two pincerlike jaws shot out and closed around her waist. Her screams tore through his helmet. Suddenly he was screaming too, with rage and helplessness.
But . . . the crab had let go. It had steered her back to a stable position away from the wall inside the control room . . . and released her . . . gently. And then Dyer saw the vicious blade of metal. She had been tumbling straight at them. Another second or two . . . He blinked and shook his head—but he hadn’t dreamed it.
Laura was still choking back her remaining sobs of fright as he moved warily inward toward the control mom. The second crab came forward and obligingly snipped away the worst of the metal spikes to clear his path while the two destroyers hovered—somehow meekly now—in the background. Dyer drifted through the hole and came to rest totally bemused.
There were lights showing on a part of the main fusion plant control panel that was still operative. The panel had come back to life. And he noticed something else. Something had changed—something that had been around them all the time had stopped and he couldn’t place exactly what it was. Then he reached out and felt the edge of one of the consoles that was anchored solidly to the floor. It was rock-steady. He couldn’t feel any vibrations. Then it came to him. The deep throbbing and pounding that had been with them ever since they neared the Decoupler had ceased. The Decoupler was once again spinning smoothly.
It meant something.
He felt Laura clutching at his arm and could feel her trembling through his suit.
“Ray . . . what’s happening?”
“I don’t know,” he said slowly. He slid his arm around her comfortingly but his voice was far away. Slowly his mind begun functioning again. The panel had come alive again. All he had to do now to kill the fusion plant was throw a few switches. Spartacus had reactivated the panel. Spartacus was showing him how to shut it down. It was offering itself . . . inviting him to kill it if he so chose.
Why . . . ?
It meant something.
The vision of the drone snatching Laura out of harm’s way with seconds to spare replayed itself again before his mind’s eye. It reminded him of something he had seen before somewhere . . . someplace . . . long ago. A cartoon figure and a comical dog . . . FISE . . . FISE had snatched Brutus away from the glass . . . Why . . . ? It had overgeneralized . . . It had thought that everything alive was the same . . . And the nucleus of Kim’s programs was based on FISE . . .
Something very strange had happened in the last few minutes. Somehow it had something to do with the Decoupler . . .
But how . . . ?
“Well I’ll be goddamned! You did it!” Linsay’s voice came suddenly through on his radio. “I still don’t know how you two got in here, but you did it.” Dyer returned to the present to find a spacesuited figure wearing incongruous pearl-handled revolvers and a general’s steel helmet over its ISA helmet sailing in through the doorway from the gallery. There were more forms close behind him and within seconds the room had begun filling with weary-looking and battle-stained but triumphant soldiers.
“But we didn’t . . .” Dyer began, and then thought better of it. “What about the barrier?” Linsay clapped him heartily on the shoulder, sending him reeling back and clutching at the console to check himself.
“Obviously the barrier deactivated when you zapped it,” Linsay said. He caught the perplexed look on Dyer’s face and frowned suddenly. “That thing is harmless now, isn’t it?”
Spartacus had turned off the barrier! It had ceased to fight, everywhere. A look of wonder flowed slowly into Dyer’s face as the pieces of what it all meant began coming together inside his head. He turned his head slowly to look at Linsay and nodded firmly. There was no doubt in his mind now.
“Yes,” he replied. “It’s harmless. It can’t hurt anyone now.”
“Very good,” Linsay said crisply. “Then there’s only one thing left to do.” He spun himself around and began heading back toward the door.
“Where are you going?” called Dyer.
Cyber Rogues Page 39
