Book 2: 3rd World Products, Inc.

by Ed Howdershelt

  "Would that status info be correct? Can you guarantee you can get into the computer, Ellen? If I don't do something real soon, you and Leslie and I are going to be dead, instead, and who knows how many more? Now that things are out in the open, Moriarity will likely try to thoroughly wreck the place and cover his tracks. Since he can't get off the station right now, he'll probably hide among the survivors."

  I couldn't think of a way to switch off the implant, so I just said, “Stephie, let's do it. Try to save the door, though. There's already one leak in this beachball."

  She lifted us into position outside the cargo bay doors.

  "I'll try, Ed, but you know that if I detect people on the other side of the door, I won't be able to open it. My programming won't allow it."

  "Stephie, you are not to scan for people. Listen to me, lady. We have to go inside. You're to take my word that there aren't any people in the cargo bay."

  "You know I can't do that, Ed."

  I thought a moment, then said, “Option five on. Drop your canopy as soon as my suit's in place, Steph."

  I stepped across the empty space to the tiny ledge below the doors and somehow found a way to hang on and stick to the wall as I offered Stephie another chance to do things my way.

  "Stephie, now you have a choice. Either you follow my order to open the door, no matter if anyone's in the cargo bay, or I use the cutter that opened that other hole to carve a big hole in this door. Then there won't be any live people to worry about and we can get on with this show."

  "I can't let you do that, Ed. I'll have to pull you away from the door."

  "Extrapolate, Stephie. You can't get in. You have limited life support available for me. I'll die on your deck when the air runs out and hundreds more people will die inside the station because of Moriarity."

  "Ed, I don't know what to do!"

  "Then do what I tell you and open those goddamned doors, Stephie. Try to catch anyone who's pulled out. I'm trying to save all the people on the station, not just the ones who may be in the bay. You're a computer. Add it up. Four or hundreds. What's the big decision, lady? Do it!"

  For long moments, nothing seemed to happen, then the bay door opened a crack.

  "Ed!” said Stephie, “My sensors show that there's nobody in there! The bay is empty! I'm going to try to force the door to operate."

  A sliver of light began to starkly illuminate us as Stephie's efforts raised the door she'd chosen. More light, then more. The opening seemed large enough to me, but Stephie raised it a bit farther before nosing into the opening.

  I breathed a sigh of relief and jumped across the yard-wide gap to Stephie's deck. My hands and knees were shaking from the strain of hanging onto the wall as I sat down in the nearest seat.

  Once we were completely within the bay, the door slammed down behind us. For better or worse, we'd made it inside the station. Now it was just a matter of getting to the station's core, somehow.

  "Ellen, Leslie. We're in the bay. Is there any way you can get here?"

  "No, Ed. We're trapped. The decompression door is blocking the corridor."

  "You're telling me that restaurant row is designed to blow out the window if the window blows out? Check again. That would have been some mighty poor planning on someone's part."

  "There aren't any exits on my diagrams, Ed, and we can't trust the elevators."

  "Come on, Ellen. If the elevator quits between floors, how do they get to it to fix it? If it won't move with the doors open, shove a table into the goddamned thing to block them open and climb up the shaft."

  "There's nothing to climb, Ed. The elevator shafts are smooth walls with a guide rail. That's all there is inside one. Oh, no..."

  "That's twice you've said that today. Oh, no, what, Ellen?"

  "The lights are going out! It's getting hard to breathe, Ed."

  "Moriarity!” I shouted. “If you have the common sense of a pissant, you'll realize that you can't kill those women until I'm dead! They're all that will keep you alive when I get to you!"

  Watson's voice said, “You are speaking with Moriarity, Ed. I am Moriarity. You can not threaten a computer with death."

  "That's a load of crap. Why have you been trying to get rid of me? Whether you're the computer or someone running the computer, if you kill those women, I'll cut you apart in small pieces whether you're human or not. You got that?"

  "You are empowered only to investigate. Nothing more is mentioned in your file."

  "Either you haven't read my whole file or you don't have it all. At times like these I tend to lose the rulebook, Morrie. If you kill, I kill. It's that simple."

  After a moment, Watson said, “If I let the women live and you manage to reach me, you will not harm me in any way?"

  "That's the deal. If you're the computer, you get fixed. If you're human, you deal with the authorities. There's no death penalty up here, unfortunately, so you'll probably have to talk to a lot of doctors, but at least you'll be alive to do it."

  "How can I believe you? How can I trust you?"

  "You can't afford not to. I'm going to get to you if you can't kill me, and I've already survived one of your best tricks. You can't take the chance that I'll make it."

  There was silence for several moments, then Watson said, “Those women will live no longer than you do."

  Melodramatic asshole, I thought.

  "Ellen?"

  "We're here, Ed. The lights are on again. We...” Her voice cut off.

  Watson said, “That's enough. They're alive. I didn't promise to let you chat with them."

  Word contractions? Impatience? That's new.

  "Maybe I don't trust you, Morrie. Maybe I want to be able to check to see if they're still okay. What difference will it make? Maybe they'll distract me for you."

  "Perhaps they will. As you say, then. What can it hurt?"

  Ellen came back on line. “Ed? Ed? Leslie, I think we've been cut off."

  I pulled my memo book from my pocket and wrote, 'Shields up. Best speed to core. Computer fix first.'

  Watson asked, “What are you doing?"

  "Taking notes. Thinking."

  "That won't help you, Ed."

  "Then it won't matter, will it?"

  Ellen called again. I ignored her. Moriarity sounded almost angry when he spoke.

  "You said you wanted to be able to talk with the women. Why aren't you answering her?"

  "Just leave the link open, Morrie."

  I very briefly held the memo book up close to Stephie's screen as I closed it. Stephie's response was to lift a few inches from the floor and move forward at a walking speed. Images flashed on her video screen. She appeared to be reviewing the station's diagrams at random, but that seemed unlikely.

  Our first serious obstacle was a decompression door at the corridor entrance.

  "Show me a schematic of the doorway, Steph."

  The door was a marvelously simple thing. It fell into place from the ceiling, following grooves in the walls, if there was a quick and serious loss of air pressure. It had no locking mechanism and needed none. The door's weight was quite enough to hold it in place. It was five inches thick, as all of them were, and made of solid steel mined from the iron core of the asteroid.

  "Can you override the controls, Stephie?"

  "No, Ed."

  "Any other ideas?"

  "I'm thinking."

  "What's above it? Below it?"

  "Below, ten feet of steel deck. Above, a slot for the door and more steel deck. There's not much to work with, Ed."

  "What pulls it back up into the ceiling, Steph?"

  "A pair of motors turn gears that winch it back up."

  "But you can't get control of the controls?"

  "No."

  "How thick is the ceiling by the door?"

  "Three inches."

  "Lift me. I'll slice it open from wall to wall, then carve away the grooves. You put a field on it to hold it up until I'm clear."

  "There are three more
of these doors before we can proceed to a position directly above the core, Ed. This could take quite a while."

  "We have the time, Steph. Whether he kills the women or not, we have the time. Are you getting any more info out of the computer? Can you find out what the other people on the station are doing?"

  Watson said, “Everybody is sleeping, Ed. All except your two women. I became bored with their incessant complaints and attempts to gain control, so I flooded every deck with sedative gas. The board of directors thoughtfully installed crowd control measures. This is the first chance I've had to test them. They work very well."

  "You'd better hope you didn't misread the labels again, Morrie. Or did the sedative you sent me go sour in the can? Stephie, see if he's lying to us."

  "The people I'm able to reach with my sensors are asleep, Ed."

  "Thank you, ma'am."

  Moriarity/Watson said no more and neither did I until the great door fell to the deck nearly half an hour later.

  "That's one, Morrie. Sorry it took so long. I really want to meet you, you know."

  There was no response. We moved forward over the carcass of the door. I wrote in my memo book, 'At next door, check other side for explosive gas before I cut.'

  When I held my book up to her screen, Watson's voice was sharp and angry.

  "What the hell are you doing? Get that book away from that screen or ... Or I'll open every God-damned door on the station for you, Ed, starting with the ones on the outer hull."

  Interesting. Now he's swearing. A computer without self-awareness wouldn't get angry. Wouldn't swear, either.

  "Open all the doors and I'll just get to you quicker, Morrie. I don't believe that you're a computer, you know. I think you have partial control of it, yes, but I also think you have a bitch of a time making it bypass safety protocols. Kill the ladies and you suffer for a long time before you die. I was a medic once, Morrie. I know what only hurts a little and what hurts a helluva lot, and I can keep you alive until I've had my fill of revenge."

  After a moment Watson said, “That was a fine speech, Ed. The name is not Morrie; it's Moriarity. To put things as you did, you can't take that chance that I'll do it."

  I let him hear me chuckle.

  "Sure I can, dumbshit. You've already promised to kill me and the women and you've threatened to kill everybody else aboard. Since you've already killed quite a few people, what kind of fool would I be if I didn't believe you? But you know what will happen if you deflate this ball, don't you, Morrie? You and I will be the only living things on this station until I get you or you get me, Morrie. You can't hide forever and you won't get off the station. No, Morrie, your best chance to stay alive is to keep everybody else alive for now."

  "I can stand people up in front of you and kill them one at a time, Ed. One every six yards. Two hundred and four people. Can you watch that happen and keep coming? Could you live with it?"

  "Sure, Morrie. If you stop me, they die anyway. We already covered that."

  I wrote, '1200 yards? To where? Core is a mile from here. Amaran computers all think in meters? One tap if right.'

  Stephie field-tapped my left shoulder once.

  "Stephie, that door. Remember how you dealt with the Russian capsule?"

  "Yes, Ed. We can't do that. We're not in space. A particle beam will penetrate the entire station."

  "All the way through? Out the other side?"

  "Yes, Ed."

  "Holy shit. Oh, well. There's no groove in the floor, Steph. Cut a semicircular hole near the bottom of the door that's big enough to fly through, then push against the cutout. If your beam is as mean as you say it is, there'll be a cutout in all the doors, not just this one."

  "There'll be a cutout all the way to open space, Ed."

  "The survivors of this situation can look for leaks later. Do it."

  I couldn't see the beam, but I saw the results. A tiny bright spot quickly traced a half-circle on the door ahead of us. I heard a hissing sound and realized with surprise that my ears seemed to be working again, sort of.

  Stephie didn't move, but when her field pushed against the cutout, it did. It slid backward, out of the door and into the corridor beyond, where it fell flat. Looking through the hole as we advanced, I tried to see what affect we'd had on the other doors ahead of us, but they were too far away to tell. I had to take Stephie's word that her beam had performed as advertised.

  The corridor lights went out. Stephie's lights came on.

  "Stephie, did we cut anything important?"

  "Nothing that would disrupt power, Ed."

  "Hey, Morrie! Are you messing with the power?"

  There was no answer.

  "Well, that's it. Assume that he's panicked or he's bailing out of this. Best speed for 1200 yards and look for something using power nearby."

  She launched herself forward at the next door at a speed that actually alarmed me a bit. The door's cutout began moving before we were halfway there. I could hear it screech, metal on metal, as she used her shaped field to shove it out of our way.

  Stephie's timing was rather alarming, as well. The cutout was still falling and hadn't quite landed as we skimmed over it. Her tail was clear of the hole in the door before the cutout slammed to the deck.

  The other two doors fell to her charm the same way, and just beyond the last one, she stopped us cold and turned her nose to our right.

  "There was a faint power reading fifty-four feet away, Ed, but it's not there now."

  "Do you detect any power use anywhere in the station, Stephie?"

  "No, Ed. The station is completely off-line. The field generator is on, but he's shut everything down."

  "Stephie, if he's cut power to the whole place, the air that's leaking out isn't being replaced. The core has priority. Let's get there as quickly as possible."

  She turned herself to face the way we'd been heading and sped toward the next cutout in the series of compression doors that stood between us and the core.

  Chapter Twenty-three

  I hung on and refused to be terrorized during our flight. When Stephie finally stopped, she was facing a room doorway. She told me to look at her screen. Her display showed that the core was in a room three decks directly below us. Her display then changed to show the nearby elevator shaft.

  "Damn. More climbing around. I'm going to wind up coughing up these damned ribs, Stephie."

  "That would be anatomically impossible, but it is possible that your condition is interfering with your mental acuity, Ed. I can lower you with a field."

  Duh. Yes, she could. No climbing. But wait just one little minute...

  "Just tell me how to turn that computer back on and I'll be on my way, ma'am, but what if that doesn't do the trick? In that case, I'll need your core, and if I have your core, you aren't going to be carrying me. I'll be carrying you."

  "That's a problem we can consider while you see if resetting the computer will bring the station back online. Until you take out my core, I'll be able to field you to that level and bring you back. Let's try a reset first. We have less than thirty minutes to work."

  Stephie's thoughts on the matter didn't sound like suggestions. Her 'Let's try a reset first' sounded almost like an order to me. I hopped off her deck.

  "As I was saying, ma'am, I'll be on my way now."

  The elevator cylinder's door was closed, of course, since the elevator was somewhere else. The door was like the room doors, only about half an inch thick. It cut quickly as I drew a line with my cutter around the doorframe.

  Stephie put a field on the door and pulled it free of the elevator shaft, then set it down next to me. Her field then wrapped around me and lifted me a few inches.

  "Ready?” she asked.

  "Guess so. Lower away."

  Inside the shaft were indented ledges that I'd never seen before when using the ship's elevators or the station's. I stuck my fingers in one experimentally as I passed it. Yup. Just right for hands and feet. Climbing notches. I wondered why
the hell I'd never noticed them before, then I realized that I had, but only as a sort of broken stripe on the wall as the high-speed elevators were moving.

  Stephie stopped my descent at another doorway and told me that I'd arrived.

  As I began cutting the door away, I asked, “Stephie, did you know that there are climbing notches in elevators?"

  "Ed, I'm a flitter. My programmers probably didn't think I'd be using elevators."

  "Uh, huh. Well, Ellen and I use the damned things and we didn't know about them, either, smartass."

  "If I were able to use elevators, I would think it quite reasonable to know how to disembark one if it malfunctioned. I'd go so far as to call it a responsibility, I think. Perhaps even a duty to oneself."

  "You've made your point, Stephie. Well put, indeed. I'll bet I can rent you out to give safety lectures. How would you like that?"

  "I get paid the same no matter what I do. As you say so often, 'no biggie'."

  I kicked the door and watched it fall to the corridor floor, then looked both ways for trouble before exiting the shaft.

  "Uh, huh. Speaking of pay, something occurred to me a while back. When the day comes that you're legally your own person, you may need money for something. I don't know what the hell that would be, really, but you still may need a few bucks now and then. I've been thinking about how to get you a bank account."

  I paused at the door to the room that had been indicated.

  "Steph, can you scan the room ahead of me for anything that might explode if I cut the door? Where would the core be in there? Front? Center? Back wall?"

  "As far as I can tell, the room itself is inert, Ed. No explosives or traps. The core would be in the panel on the back wall. Why would I have need of money?"

  "Steph, I'd have boobytrapped the room. I have to assume that Morrie would be at least as nasty as me. Are you sure?"

  "Nothing dangerous shows on my sensors, Ed. That's the best I can do from here. Why would I need money?"

  I decided on general principles to cut my way into the room somewhere else and chose a section of wall about six feet from the door, starting my cut at the floor. At a height of about three feet, I smelled smoke. Wood or paper was burning in the room.