“Veb!” Rik, apparently, already had his friend on the phone. He touched Freymann's and Burleigh's hands so they could listen in.
“Rik! I was just about to call you. We're at the nanohacker's place now, and something weird has come up.”
“Tell him to stitch her up right now and don't go near the blasted woman. It's a bomb, Veb. She's a walking bomb. Is she in a Faraday cage, like you said?”
Freymann heard Veb at the other end, shouting instructions. Then he came back. “Yeah, they're in a cage. Hey!” He went away for a moment and there was shouting in the background. “Sorry Rik, I had to make the guy shut up. He was trying to throw us both out. Jerk pulled a gun. What's going on?”
“We're on our way, Veb. Keep the guy with you. We're going to need him, but don't let Rivers leave that cage for one second, or we're all dead. You got that?”
“Sure.” The upload didn't sound too certain, but it was good enough for Rik.
“Lieutenant, can you rustle up some bot-techs? The kind that could disassemble this thing?”
Burleigh didn't answer but got onto his own phone and started organising people. The pod started up again, did a U-turn and headed for the address that came with Veb's call.
“Will they be able to dismantle it?” he asked Freymann.
The agent shrugged. “I have no idea. I'm just a field agent. You see these things in briefings, but they don't tell you which wire to cut. It's a specialist job.” And the nearest specialists would be four hundred thousand kilometres away, on Earth. “We just need to stop the trigger signal from getting through. If Burleigh's guys can disable the receiver, we should be OK. She won't be radioactive. Not much, anyway.”
Burleigh got off the phone, looking unhappy. “The Mayor just declared a general quarantine.”
“What?” Rik sounded like he was about to start chewing the furniture. “We need an evacuation, not a lock-down! Did you tell her about the bomb?”
Burleigh pursed his lips. “She thinks we should deal with one major crisis at a time.”
Rik was silent, no doubt as dumbstruck as Freymann by the sheer idiocy of the notion.
“Oh, and she's ordered me to implement roadblocks all over the city, to prevent anyone from panicking and trying to leave.”
“She doesn't have any jurisdiction over UNPF forces,” Freymann said.
“Yeah. When I explained that, she suggested my commanding officer might be more co-operative.” He looked briefly at the pod's plastic ceiling. “I'm guessing that would be Major Herez's call now.”
Burleigh went into a scowling huddle with his cogplus, and Freymann watched him in silence.
Chapter 40
Rik slammed the side of his clenched fist against the pod door. The flimsy plastic shell shook ominously. The first time he had ever seen any kind of traffic jam in Heinlein, and it had to be today. Of course, the reason was obvious.
Ever since the Mayor had declared the quarantine, every man, woman, child and cockroach in the city had taken to the streets, trying to find a way off-world. The UNPF roadblocks just added to the chaos. If somebody in authority didn't do something sensible soon, the good people of Heinlein would start tearing their way through the tunnel walls.
The big police lieutenant sitting beside him was in a sulk. His commanding officer had suspended him and ordered him back to barracks. Freymann, too, had fallen silent as the stop-start journey finally ground to a complete halt.
Rik checked out the streets around him. If he strained his neck, he could just make out the entrance to The Harsh Mistress, a block ahead of them. That meant Veb's nanotech guy was just one tunnel across, one down, and a couple more blocks farther along.
“I'm walking,” he told whoever cared to know, and pushed back the sliding door. Neither of his companions argued.
The street was busy. A solid queue of electric carts, bulging with people and luggage, clogged the transitway. People hurried past them on the sidewalk, carrying whatever they had thought to snatch up. Most were going the way the police car had just come, back towards the spaceport. Rik, with Burleigh and Freymann in his wake, pushed through them like a bulldozer. Even the uploads made way for him without demur.
It was because of the crowds that Rik didn't see the little runt of a boy until he was almost past him. It was the same kid he'd seen staring into the bar just before the fight. The kid was standing on a packing crate outside The Harsh Mistress, looking at the faces of the passing crowd, searching for someone. Rik changed course.
“Hey.”
The boy almost fell off his box, finding Rik yelling in his ear. For a moment, the kid just stared into Rik's eyes.
“So?” Rik asked. It was pretty obvious that the boy was looking for him, and that he had something to say.
“It's my father.”
Hearing the boy's Scottish accent, a dozen suppositions sprang to Rik's mind, but he held his tongue.
“He's going to do something terrible.”
“You're talking about McGregor, right?” He could see Greet-Greet's features in the boy's now that he looked more closely. The poor little bastard.
“That's right. You've got to stop him.”
Greet-Greet was Cordell's man. What would Cordell have him do that was so terrible?
“Where is he?”
“He's in church.”
“Which church?” Heinlein had more churches than whorehouses. And that was a lot.
“I'll take you.”
The boy jumped down and set off to cross the street but Rik's big hand caught him by the shoulder of his tattered shirt. “Tell me what this is about, first. I need to be somewhere else, not playing games with you.”
The boy looked stricken, as if Rik's stubbornness was the last straw, just too much for him to cope with. “He's going to kill my Mammy,” he wailed, almost in tears. “He's going to kill everybody.”
Rik looked across at Freymann and Burleigh, to see what they made of it.
“A trap?” Burleigh asked.
Freymann bent down to speak to the boy. “My name's Fariba,” she said. “What's yours?”
The tiny light of hope in the boy's eyes made Rik feel like a heel for treating him so roughly.
“Izzy,” the boy said. “It's short for Isaiah.”
“Don't worry, Izzy. We won't let your mother come to any harm,” Burleigh said, assuming the role of policeman again.
“Cordell must know by now that Lanham's plan has failed,” Freymann said. “That means Cordell's plan fails too.”
Rik saw where she was going. “So he'll have a backup, some other way to blow up the city and blame it on Omega Point.” The other two were clearly with him, so he let the boy go. “OK. Let's get moving.”
“Great!” the boy said, and hurried off.
-oOo-
The Radionuclidian church was not far away, although the crowds made the going slow. The boy, Izzy, kept getting ahead of them and would then wait, jiggling with impatience for them to catch up. Rik could barely credit the idea that a miserable worm like Greet-Greet McGregor had a child, and a wife. It just didn't seem right. On the other hand, it occurred to him that people had said similar things about himself and Maria.
For the first time in ages, he wondered how she was doing. Burleigh had confirmed that she was being looked after at the UNPF HQ, but what that amounted to at a time like this, he could only guess. He pictured her on a bench in a corridor or in the reception area, sipping genteelly at a coffee, with the desk sergeant glancing her way from time to time.
Maria was a puzzle to him now. Seeing her again had been like seeing someone from a different reality: an elf-creature, perhaps; beautiful and otherworldly, delicate and vulnerable in this knockabout world of human apes. Whatever connection he had once imagined he had with such a being was beyond his ability to recall. He remembered trying to hold her with infinite tenderness, like a child with a butterfly, damaging those lovely wings despite his overwhelming desire to possess it and keep it safe.
> Somehow, Rik had stepped out of that fantastical realm of elf-maids and impossible yearnings, into a harder, tougher, more honest place. He glanced at Freymann, hurrying along beside him, her pretty face set and determined, and thought that it was she who had led him into that new, more vivid reality. He wanted to stop and thank her for it.
But they were already there.
There was no name on the standard commercial prefab unit, just the usual level, tunnel and unit designator, but the boy insisted it was his father's church, the Church of the Holy Radionuclide. The irony that they had come there looking for a nuke did not escape Rik. The door was closed and there was a cheap electronic lock on it.
Burleigh stepped forward, pulling a shotgun from the holster on his back. He levelled it at the lock.
“Why don't I just knock politely?” he said.
Rik looked around for the rest of the lieutenant's troops, but they were nowhere in sight.
“If you're looking for my support act, I told them to go do what the Major told them to do. No point in us all ending up in gaol.”
“Let's just think about this a minute,” Rik said.
Freymann told the boy to stand well clear, and made sure he did it, before she came to stand beside Rik.
“Cordell expected the uploads to blow the town up and start a war with Earth that they can't win, but we stopped that from happening. So Cordell has invoked his backup plan, which is to have a religious nut down here do the job. What about Lanham? Might he have a backup plan too? Is there another bomb being primed somewhere else in town?”
“No.” Freymann sounded confident, and Rik was very glad of it. “The nuke inside Rivers was Lanham's backup. He wasn't planning to take out Heinlein. He just wanted to get the credulity nexus vector. If that failed, if the phials got broken, he needed to sterilise the area. That was why he put the nuke inside the person who was most likely to be on the spot if his first plan failed.”
“I guess you're right.” Rik's own reasoning was essentially the same. “He still believes Heinlein has been infected. I got a reply to my message just before we left the car. He wished us all farewell. He said my story about an elaborate double-cross by Cordell was just the kind of thing an infected man would believe.”
Rik took a deep breath and drew his gun. Freymann followed his example. “OK,” he said. “If you wouldn't mind opening the door, Lieutenant?”
Burleigh dropped to one knee and fired – on the Moon discharging a big gun downward was a surefire way to end up sitting on your ass. A hole a foot wide appeared where the lock had been. Rick and Freymann kicked in the door and rushed through before anyone inside had a chance to recover from the shock.
Greet-Greet McGregor had tumbled from a plastic seat when the shot came, and now he slowly rose to his feet. Rik and Freymann kept him covered as they fanned out to either side, with Burleigh coming up the middle. There were two other people in the church: a young, emaciated woman with lank blonde hair, and a middle-aged woman wearing a headscarf. They looked alarmed, but not terrified, and Rik didn't like the way that Greet-Greet's expression was slowly turning to one of triumph.
“Where is it?” Rik said, looking around the room. Apart from a few chairs and a viewscreen on the wall flashing numbers, there really was only one place to hide even a small nuke. Sure enough, one of the women glanced towards the little altar.
“Cuff 'em,” he snapped to Burleigh and strode over to Greet-Greet. The little man didn't flinch, but met Rik's furious glare with an expression of manic excitement. Rik ploughed into him, lifting him off his feet, dragging him by the neck to the altar, scattering chairs as he went. His fury increased as he realised the viewscreen was counting down. The digits flicked past thirty as he watched.
“Shut it off!” He threw the Scotsman against the altar with enough force to knock out the front panel. Greet-Greet lay on the ground beside it and laughed. The screen showed twenty-five seconds.
Rik was on him in a moment, smashing his fist into the man's face. “Your fucking son is standing outside, you little shit!” Greet-Greet fell, stunned, against the mechanism inside the altar, but when he looked up, he was smiling again.
“Vengeance is mine, sayeth the–”
Rik hit him again. Eighteen seconds. This time Greet-Greet showed no sign of getting up, so Rik hurled him aside. “Fariba,” he yelled. “Can you do anything to stop this?”
She reached the altar as the display showed ten seconds. One of the women started up some kind of chant or hymn, and the other one joined in. Rik had seen old vids where the hero, in situations like this, would cut one of the wires that laced the bomb, successfully choosing the right one against all the odds. But the mechanism had no wires. What kind of electronic device had wires these days? There were just a dozen smooth casings, bolted together.
“Four seconds,” Freymann said, in a whisper.
Rik reached for his gun. He'd laid it beside him when he bent down to look inside the altar, and had to grope for it on the floor. He moved back and aimed it at the device. If there was only one thing left to do, then he'd better get on and do it. He squeezed the trigger, feeling the hammer slide back.
The gun went off at the same moment Freymann hit his forearm with the heel of her hand. The bullet tore through the side of the altar, missing the bomb by a couple of centimetres. Rik struggled for balance, bellowing with surprise and anger, whirling as fast as he could to take another shot.
But Freymann was blocking him and Burleigh was shouting, “No, Rik. Look!”
He glanced at the cop then followed his gaze to the timer display. It was steady at zero.
“What the...?”
Burleigh started laughing. “The damned thing didn't go off! The stupid assholes must have put it together wrong.”
Rik goggled at the unexploded nuke. In a flash he saw in his mind's eye Greet-Greet and the other faithful, struggling with a spanner and a set of schematics for the complex piece of kit that had been smuggled to the Moon piece by piece. The mental image was so ludicrous, the fact of his continuing existence so marvellous, that he too started laughing. He grabbed Freymann and pulled her to him, hugging her in wordless appreciation as he roared out his sheer, unconstrained joy at being alive.
Chapter 41
Martin Lanham was not himself that day. In fact, he wasn't sure quite who he was. To the crew of The Phenomenon of Man, he was Captain Louis Campos, upload and loyal servant of Omega Point. And indeed, even to himself, he was part Campos, the part that had qualified as a ship's pilot and had flown around the system for over thirty years, man and boy. He also had the man's speech and language patterns, his motor skills and habits, all those bits and pieces that made the crew see Campos when they looked at him and not just the old robotic body with another man's spirit animating it. It was a strange feeling to move and sound like someone else and not feel quite yourself, even inside your own mind.
The process that had copied Lanham's mind into this other man's shell had left much behind. Not just Lanham's physical and linguistic peculiarities, but also large parts of his knowledge and his cognitive abilities. Some of that was because there just wasn't room in Campos' brain box for the massive amounts of processing and storage Lanham required these days, but also, because there were some things it was best for a copy not to know, secrets, codes, special things that might help it usurp the original.
Creating copies of human minds was illegal throughout the system, and the uploads were the most vociferous in ensuring that it remained so. The various laws and treaties that enabled an uploaded mind to retain the legal status of its original human version depended crucially on the legal doctrine of “transferable consciousness”, a convenient fiction that the lawyers themselves referred to as the “mind as soul” doctrine. As long as there was only one version of each individual's mind in the whole universe, the illusion that a person's consciousness was relocated at the point of death seemed to convince most people. Seeing multiple copies of that same individual in diff
erent bodies would definitely weaken the argument.
Yet it was sometimes convenient, Lanham found, to make a copy of himself. There were times when he needed to be on the spot to make a judgement call, and a seventeen minute round trip conversation would not be acceptable. Today was one of those times, and Lanham blessed his own foresight in sending himself along on this trip.
“Are you sure this trajectory is right, Captain?” The co-pilot was a young woman, a living human, inexperienced and anxious about challenging her captain. Yet she had quickly seen what Lanham was doing.
“This would eventually put us into a powered descent. It would–”
She slumped forward in her seat, and Lanham put the stunner back in his pocket. She would still be unconscious when the manoeuvre was complete. A mercy. He might disconnect his own mind before the end, or at least turn down his endocrine simulation to nothing. He had no desire to experience fear, or even excitement. Yet perhaps it would be interesting to watch his approaching death.
“This is Partway control to The Phenomenon of Man. Your manoeuvring thrusters have fired in contravention of your agreed orbital plan. Please readjust your orbit.”
Lanham ignored them. They were irrelevant now.
“This is Partway control to The Phenomenon of Man, please respond.” When he failed to acknowledge them again, they become more agitated. “Phenomenon of Man, we are initiating a complete systems override to bring you under our control. Please do not attempt to operate your craft.”
Red lights flashed in the cockpit, and warning messages murmured all around. The Phenomenon of Man continued to fall away from its orbit as Partway Station's computers tried in vain to commandeer the ship's systems.
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