CHAPTER THIRTY-SEVEN

Schroder was noticeably breathless as he hastened into the Oval Office in response to the emergency summons that had brought him from a room farther along the corridor where he had been talking with members of the Presidential staff. President Vaughan Nash and ISA Director-General John Belford were waiting with nervous, unsmiling faces. Schroder read the atmosphere the instant that he entered the room.

“What’s happened?” he asked as he took the vacant chair opposite Nash.

“The assault wave was cut to ribbons,” the President told him. “Spartacus used a new type of drone that runs and steers with rocket jets or something and doesn’t need air. We don’t know how. Linsay’s been pushed right back along the Spindle to the Hub and they’ve reinstated the evacuation order. John’s saying we should go to Omega.”

Schroder swung his head sharply around toward Belford and gaped at him in horrified disbelief.

“It’s already used a catcher and now it’s making its own space-worthy machines,” Belford explained defensively. “At the speed the System’s been putting new devices through to production, anything could happen any minute. It’s all set to break out of Janus and I say we can’t let that happen. If we don’t stop it now, next time might be too late.”

“But they’re evacuating!” Schroder protested. “For God’s sake—the people are getting out! We’ve got to give them a chance up there. The guts of it will still be in Janus even if it does manage to send out a few scouts, which from what you’re telling me it hasn’t even gotten around to doing yet. We can still blow its brains out after the people are off. If anything gets away in the meantime, it’ll cease functioning with the brains gone.”

“Suppose it puts enough of its brains in a ship that gets away to start growing itself all over again,” Belford objected. “It’d be like a virus let loose all over the Solar System. The only way to wipe it out is while it’s all still in one place and we don’t know how long that’ll last.”

“How could it grow?” Schroder demanded. “It wouldn’t have any manufacturing. And besides that, the missiles can pick off anything that does try getting away. I say no—not until the people are out.”

“I agree with Irwin,” Nash came in. “If we woke up tomorrow and decided we’d been too hasty, it’d follow us around for the rest of our lives. We agreed that the decision had to be unanimous. It’s two to one against. Therefore we wait.”

“Very well,” Belford concurred with a sharp nod. “I have to accept that. But I’d like my opinion committed to record.”

Up on Janus, Dyer had left Krantz and Linsay arguing heatedly in the side conference room and returned to the Command Floor, The scene around him was one of frantic activity as the controllers and operators tried to make sense of the confused messages coming in from the Hub and to maintain some measure of coordination between what was going on there and in other places.

The intended evacuation from Northport had again been postponed following the failure of Operation Knockout. Some of the less seriously hurt from among those wounded earlier were unloaded from the first shuttle due out, in order to make room for those seriously wounded in the course of Knockout. The work of changing the quotas was hampered by the flow of survivors pouring back out of the Spindle to regroup and by the frantic efforts going on all over the Hub to prepare new defensive positions, not only against a possible breakout from the Spindle now, but also against the possibility of break-ins from the outside. The whole of the Hub was in chaos and another full hour went by before the first shuttle was at last reported as being ready to go.

Dyer was with Chris and Ron at the back of a group standing before one of the screens to watch the scene outside Northport as the shuttle detached from its dock and began falling away into space.

The missile came out of a port that Spartacus had made in the north of Detroit. It had made the secondary reflector ring, skidded around to pass between the spokes, and impacted on the shuttle before the ISA ships had even had time to react. The pandemonium that erupted on every side of where Dyer was standing was cut short as the shuttle reappeared, intact behind where the detonation had flashed.

“It’s okay!” somebody yelled above the din. “By God, it’s made it!”

“It’s taken a kick up the ass, though,” someone else said. “Look at its back end.”

On the screen the shuttle had lurched off course, trailing debris from its shattered stem. It seemed to be drifting freely without any ability to correct. Its captain reported loss of steering and propulsion but, to the relief of those watching, no damage to the passenger compartments; as far as he could tell there had been no casualties. Watchdog Two, one of the three ISA ships standing by, immediately departed from its position to match course with the shuttle and begin transferring its occupants over.

Why the missile should have been equipped with such an inadequate warhead remained something of a mystery. The most likely explanation. Dyer thought, was that Spartacus hadn’t made sufficient allowance for the lack of shock waves in the airless environment that it was only just beginning to comprehend. If so, he told himself grimly, there would be little chance of it getting its sums wrong next time.

“Where’d it learn to make missiles?” Ron asked incredulously. “Not from the one we fired at the hippo, surely. That’s crazy.”

“We’ve lost a lot of time since then,” Dyer reminded him. “It didn’t take long to come up with airless drones, did it? I guess we’re still learning that it gets things done a lot quicker than people.”

Krantz and Linsay had emerged from the conference room as soon as the commotion started and by now were aware of what had taken place.

“We’ll have to abandon evacuating,” Krantz declared. “We can’t get out and the ISA ships can’t get in.”

“That missile was practically a dud,” Linsay argued. “The thing to do is press on. Why wait until Spartacus has made better ones?”

“We have to take out Spartacus first.”

“How? We tried. You saw what happened.”

“Spartacus is running wild. You know what that means.” Beads of perspiration were beginning to appear on Krantz’s forehead. “We must stop it. ISA could put a large missile right into the middle of Detroit...knock out the fusion plant that way.”

“You’re crazy,” Lindsay protested. “If Detroit came apart the whole Radiator Assembly could smash straight through the Rim. You’d end up killing everybody...a damnsight faster than Spartacus ever could.”

“It’s a chance we have to take. We don’t have any other.”

Dyer was half listening, puzzling over what it was that Linsay was supposed to know, when he noticed Laura gesturing from the edge of the group of people that included Chris and Ron. He walked quickly back and raised his eyebrows in response to the look of urgency written across her face.

“Kim’s gone,” she said.

“What do you mean, ‘gone’?”

“She’s disappeared. She was scheduled to be shipped up to the Hub as soon as the first shuttle had left, When the medics went to her room upstairs to get her, she’d vanished.”

“Oh Christ!” Dyer spread his hands helplessly and motioned at the bedlam all around the Command Floor. “Not now...not at a time like this. What the hell can anyone do about it with all this going on?”

“You’ve got to find her,” Laura pleaded. “She’s part of your team. You brought her up here and she’s sick. She could walk into anything.” Chris and Ron had overheard and moved closer to listen.

“Try tracking her viewpad ID code,” Chris suggested, “She’s probably still carrying it.” Dyer spun abruptly and strode across to where Eric Jassic was supervising operations at one of the master communications consoles. When the others caught up with him he was already explaining what he wanted.

“That’s a privacy violation,” Jassic said dubiously. “Needs okaying by Krantz.”

“Eric, so help me, I’ll break your neck,” Dyer grated. “Just do it!” Jassic glanced up, read the look in Dyer’s eyes and began hammering commands into his console without further ado.

“She’s in a cab,” he told them a few seconds later. “Heading west between Downtown and Paris. It’s logged the fermentation plant at Vine County as its destination.”

“What the hell would she do there?” Ron asked in astonishment. Nobody knew.

Dyer called the provost marshal who in turn alerted his men in Vine County to intercept the cab on arrival. Many minutes passed while the group around the console followed the cab’s progress. It was agonizingly slow. For some insane reason Kim was stopping at practically every point in between, but she didn’t get out. At last the data on the screen told them she had arrived at the fermentation plant. They waited anxiously for the call to come through on one of the auxiliary screens. At last the tone sounded and a few seconds later a puzzled provost was staring out at them.

“This some kinda joke or sump’n?” he demanded.

“What?” Dyer asked.

“There ain’t nobody in this cab. There’s just somebody’s pad on one of the seats. You people tryin’ ta make monkeys out of us here or sump’n?”

“Sorry...it must have been...a mistake.” Dyer cut off the screen and turned back to the stupefied faces behind him. “She guessed. It was just a decoy. She could be anywhere by now.”

“She might be sick but she’s still got her head screwed on okay,” Laura said. “Ray, we have to do something.”

“What the hell are we supposed to do?” Dyer demanded. “We’ve got a crazy computer making missiles, the roof could fall in any second, and nobody knows if we can get out or not. She could be anywhere in this mess. There simply isn’t—“ At that moment the emergency tone sounded shrilly from Chris’s viewpad. Chris slipped it from his pocket and frowned as he interrogated the screen.

“Bloody hell!” he exclaimed suddenly. “This isn’t true.”

“What is it?” Ron asked.

“My apartment in Berlin,” Chris said. “The intruder alarm’s been triggered. Somebody’s breaking in!”

“That couldn’t be Kim, could it?” Laura asked, sounding amazed and perplexed.

Chris tapped in the codes to connect the cameras in his apartment to the screen of the viewpad. The camera in the hall had been put out of action already by whomever had broken in, but another by the back door tantalized by showing the shadow of somebody moving behind a projecting corner in the wall without revealing who the somebody was. Ron looked over Chris’s shoulder and watched thoughtfully. Then he snapped his fingers.

“That is Kim,” he said quietly. “She’s after the Gremlin.” Chris looked up at him, horrified.

“What Gremlin?” Dyer asked them.

“It’s too long a story to go into now,” Ron said. “There’s a Gremlin there—sighter plus projectiles. Kim’s the only other person who knows about it. That has to be her.”

“What’s she going to do with it?” Laura asked.

Ron shrugged, “Search me. The state she’s in, it could be anything.”

One of the console operators, a freckle-faced girl who had been standing on the fringe of the group of people nearby, moved forward a pace to speak to them.

“Excuse me. I couldn’t help hearing some of the things you’ve been saying. Are you looking for Kimberley Sinclair?”

“Yes,” Dyer said. “Why?”

“She was here earlier.”

“How d’you mean, ‘here’? Where?”

The girl gestured vaguely around.

“Here...in the Command Room. She was standing next to me right over there by the stairs when everybody was watching the shuttle leaving Northport...when the missile nearly got it. She didn’t seem well at all I was wondering if I should say anything to anybody.”

“Well, we think we know where she is now,” Dyer told her. “Thanks anyway.”

“She was talking kind of strange,” the girl went on, evidently unhappy about leaving it at that. “She was there until Mr. Krantz and General Linsay started talking about what to do next. She said something about if nobody else could make up their minds how to stop it, she would. Then she took off.”

“She didn’t say anything else?” Dyer asked.

“No...I don’t think so...nothing that made much sense, anyway. Something about breaking it off and putting it where the missiles could tear it apart.”

“Oh God!” Ron’s face turned a shade paler. He looked woodenly at Chris. “Do you think it could be what I think it could be?”

Chris stared back at him blankly for a second, then his jaw dropped. “Mat Solinsky...the grand tour...the view from the window?”

Ron nodded.

“What are you two talking about?” Dyer asked them.

“We think she’s going to the Hub,” Chris said. “She’s going to try jamming up the Spin Decoupler by putting a Gremlin into it...If it does, it’ll tear Janus in half. We’ll all be in one half and Spartacus will be on its own in the other. Then the ISA ships can finish it off. That’s what she’s doing.”

Dyer closed his eyes for a moment while he struggled to digest what his ears were telling him. He looked from Chris to Ron and shook his head in protest.

“But that’s insanity,” he said. “It couldn’t break off clean...not with being locked solid that far off-center. The whole southern half of Janus would wheel around and smash the Rim into scrap metal. Pittsburgh and Detroit would plow straight through this place like an eggshell.”

“I know that and you know that,” Ron agreed soberly. “But maybe Kim isn’t in any state of mind to worry about that kind of risk right now. There’s only one thing she cares about, and that’s stopping Spartacus. I don’t think she’s bothered how she does it.”