Cyber Rogues (29 page)

All indications were, therefore, that
Spartacus
would have a tough time finding a way through such a formidable barrier of obstacles, if indeed a way existed. But even if it failed as many people were predicting it was bound to, the mere fact that it had tried would say a lot about how far it had evolved, and the way in which it went about it would provide valuable information on the internal changes that had taken place to get it there.

* * *

Kim stood at the edge of the patio that led from the rear of Chris’s Berlin apartment to the small roof garden beyond, and stared in astonishment at the object that Ron was unwrapping from its cocoon of plastic sheeting. In this part of Berlin the apartments were terraced up the steeply rising edge of the Rim and every man’s roof was another man’s garden.

“
Jesus!
It’s a Gremlin sighter,” Kim exclaimed.

“Where in hell did you two get that thing from? I thought they were supposed to be kept locked up.”

“Oh, let’s just say we’ve got connections,” Ron said nonchalantly. “And that’s not all either. How about this?” He delved back into the long, thin aluminum carry-case and brought out two pointed yellow cylinders, each somewhat under a foot long and about two inches thick.

“What do you think you’re going to do with it?” Kim demanded. “I came over here to talk about organizing a barbecue, not get mixed up in a revolution.”

Chris, who had been standing watching with his thumbs hooked in his pockets, hoisted the sighter up onto the table beside them and began stripping away some of the outer casing. The recesses below the eyepiece, into which the ranging and guidance electronics packages were supposed to fit, were empty. He selected a metal box from among the clutter of electronic test equipment and tools that littered the table, opened it to reveal the missing items and worked in silence for a while attaching test leads and tinkering with buttons and knobs.

“I can’t bear to see you getting all worked up like that,” he said over his shoulder. “Actually we’re only curious about the guidance system. If we can get it working we’re going to have a go at reprogramming it.”

“What on earth for?” Kim asked.

“If the computer in the sighter can control Gremlins remotely, then maybe you could adapt it to control drones,” Ron explained. “It’d make a super remote telescopic controller . . . You could send your own private drone wherever you wanted it to go, without worrying about linking through the net. See—neat.”

“To do what?” Kim was looking nonplused. Chris shrugged without looking up.

“I dunno,” he confessed. “Who cares? We’ll worry about that when we’ve got the thing working,”

Ron and Kim continued to watch in silence for a while as Chris studied the waveforms on one of the small screens. He grimaced and looked dubious.

“The cartridges are okay. It has to be that output driver pack, Ron. It checks through all the way up to there.”

“The K56?”

“Right.”

“Then we’re in trouble,” Ron said. “Those aren’t general-purpose grade. They’re special, purpose-designed units. Where the hell are we gonna get another one of those?” Chris put down the probe that he had been holding and squinted thoughtfully into the distance. “There is one possibility I can think of,” he said. “Wouldn’t you think there’s a fair chance that a Maintenance & Spares Unit might carry them?”

“Mat Solinsky!” Ron slapped his thigh. “Yeah, of course. I was forgetting him. Why don’t you give him a call right away.” Chris had already produced his view-pad and was tapping in the code to call up the Janus directory.

Kim nodded and looked at Ron reproachfully. “Maintenance & Spares Unit, eh? So that’s where you got it from. What did you trade for it—drone programming services or a crate of Scotch from the Officers’ Club?”

“You couldn’t get one of those in one piece for a solid gold copy of Janus,” Ron answered, nodding toward the sighter. “We scraped a bit here and a piece there . . . you know how it is.”

At that moment the face of Mat Solinsky appeared on the screen of Chris’s viewpad. He frowned for a second and then his face creased into a curly-topped smile of recognition.

“Hey, how ya been? Haven’t seen you and Ron for a coupla weeks now. When are you coming up to this part of the Hub again?”

“Fairly soon maybe, Mat,” Chris replied. “We’ve got a small problem.”

“Oh, too bad. Anything I can do?”

“Maybe. That’s really why I’m calling. Do you remember those surplus cartridges you let us have when we were last there—the KFD and KFGs?”

“Them ones you wanted for that tabletop scanning microscope you were planning on building. Yeah, I remember. What about it?” Outside the viewing angle Ron winked cheerfully at Kim. Kim shook her head and raised her eyes momentarily in despair.

“Well,” Chris replied, “we needed some kind of driver to go with part of it and somebody told us that a K56 pack should do the job. We managed to get hold of one but we think it’s a dud. What are the chances of scrounging another one from somewhere?”

“Mmm. K56s, huh.” Solinsky looked dubious. “I think they might be difficult, Restricted issue. Give me a second to check.” The face vanished to reveal a view of the inside of part of an office in Hub Section 17D.

“I always knew you two were a pair of crooks,” Kim told them.

Chris considered the statement. “There are only two types of crooks in this world,” he said finally. “The ones that won’t admit it and the rest of us. Very sad.”

“It all has to do with evolution,” Ron explained. “There’s only genes of bad guys around nowadays because good guys never did all that much to help the species along . . . Know what I mean.” Kim gave up. At that moment Solinsky appeared again on the view-pad.

“You might be in luck,” he said. “The guy that ran the outfit next-door to us here went sick a few days ago and left everything in a mess. There’s more items of all kinds of junk than there ought to be according to the records, including a couple of K56s. Do you want me to check out the one you’ve got?”

“Yes, if you can do that,” Chris replied. “What do you want me to do, just hook it in?”

“Sure. I can run a diagnostic here.”

Chris disconnected the pack from the leads, attached another short cable to a microconnector set into one end and plugged the other end into a socket on the rear of the viewpad. About twenty seconds elapsed while Solinsky attended to unseen operations offscreen.

“It’s dead,” he confirmed at last. “Looks like something’s blown in the comparator. I’ll send you another one down through the tubes. What’s your delivery address?”

“We’ll go get it,” Ron whispered. “I could use a change of scene for an hour.”

“It’s okay, Mat,” Chris said. “It’s our afternoon off while things are quiet in the Crystal Ball Room. We’ll take a trip up there and collect it.”

“Great! Do that. We’ll see ya here in what . . . say, half an hour or so?”

“Something like that.”

“Good. Well, you know where to find us. See ya then.”

Chris flipped off the pad and returned it to his pocket. They repacked the sighter in its case and stowed it back in a closet inside the apartment.

“How about coming on a trip up to the Hub?” Ron said to Kim as they were finishing. “Have a break and see some changes. We’ll stop off at the Poolside and buy you an ice cream. There’s a super view of the Spindle from where Mat works too.”

Kim shrugged and tossed out her hands.

“Why not? Okay, you’re on. I suppose if I’m going to associate with crooks anyway, I might as well enjoy it.”

“That’s the idea,” Chris said as he locked the closet door. “It’s like the old saying says—it’s a great life once you’ve weakened.”

CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE

They took the subway car from below the apartments to the basement level of the Berlin spoke, at which point the car locked into vertical drive to become an elevator. A few minutes after leaving, they emerged into the “Berlin Line” concourse at the Hub. Moving in a slow-motion ballet at four percent of normal gravity, they took the south exit and climbed toward the Spindle along a corridor whose floor curved upward in a series of shallow steps that became progressively shorter until the corridor had transformed itself into a broad staircase. Using the skill that all inhabitants of Janus had quickly learned, they ascended the stairs in a smooth gliding motion that required only occasional pushes with the feet and corrective nudges on the hand-rails to sustain momentum.

Section 17D was located in the outermost layer of the Hub facing south, some distance below part of the circle formed by the intersection of the Hub sphere with the three-hundred-foot-diameter cylinder of the Spindle. They found Solinsky in an untidy enclosure at the back of the miniature maze of partitioned offices and storerooms that formed the Maintenance & Spares Unit. Despite the fact that Janus had been operational for only a matter of months, the place already looked the way that all supplies and stores offices somehow should, with oily fingerprints on the consoles, disorderly piles of notes and requisitions strewn all over cigarette-burned desktops beneath magnetic paperweights, and stained reference charts competing with gaudy pin-ups for wallpaper.

Solinsky slipped the K56 to Chris, who put it in his pocket without either of them mentioning it.

“Say, who’s the friend?” Solinsky greeted with a broad smile. “Is this somebody else out of the Egghead Block that I never saw before?”

“That’s right,” Chris said. “This is Kim. She’s from CUNY too. Kim, this is Mat. He’s an almost civilized mutation of the American species.”

“Hi,” Solinsky grinned as he and Kim shook hands. “Wow! Some egghead. How do I get a transfer to computers?”

Kim smiled back. “I wouldn’t recommend it, Mat. You have to put up with too many insufferable Englishmen. You’re better off staying in the Army where they can’t get in.”

“Aw, I’m not so sure,” Solinsky replied. “I reckon I could stand it.” He transferred his gaze to Ron, who was surreptitiously admiring some of the pin-ups. “How’s it going, Ron? Still making time with that broad from Vine County?”

Ron screwed up his face and shook his head. “Nope. I got outgunned and sunk by some crewcut hero from the Navy. You know how it goes . . . But you oughta see her roommate—radar op in E5. Now she’s what I call really nice.”

“Is that the one who was with you in the bar last night?” Kim asked. “The one who was talking with you and Ray . . . dark hair and green pants?”

“That’s her,” Ron answered. “Not bad, eh?”

“You want to watch it,” Chris warned. “You could end up getting sunk again. You know what months away from home does to these chiefs.”

“No chance,” Ron retorted. “Ray’s got other interests. He’s—” Even as he spoke, the almost imperceptible hardening of Kim’s features told him he had said the wrong thing. Solinsky sensed the tension and stepped in to change the subject.

“I haven’t offered the grand tour,” he said. “Every new visitor to the M & S Unit gets the grand tour. You people got a few minutes?”

“What’s the grand tour?” Kim asked.

“It’s what I was telling you about,” Chris said. “It’s good. You wait and see.”

Solinsky led the way through a door at the rear of the unit and into a large room full of rows of racks and storage bins. They left through another door which brought them out onto a long walkway, running along the wall to either side and protected by a metal guardrail. The walkway looked down over a work area where several figures were busy around two beetlelike vehicles standing side by side on tripod undercarts. They were about fifteen feet long, roughly box-shaped with lots of protruding gadgetry and struts, and each was equipped with an array of external manipulator arms at its forward end. Immediately in front of the vehicles were two inner airlock doors above which the walkway continued horizontally, at the same time curving around to form a viewing platform behind the long window that made up part of the outer wall. Chris and Ron had seen it before. Kim gasped in amazement but said nothing as she followed the others in a series of slow, shallow bounds along the walkway to where it widened out, above the airlocks and immediately behind the window.

Even in the minuscule gravity there was still a remnant sense that enabled her to distinguish up from down. They were looking along the outside surface of the Spindle toward Detroit. The enormous sweep of the three-hundred-foot-diameter cylinder disappeared from view above their heads to meet with the Hub at some unseen point beyond their field of vision. The Spindle extended away for over five hundred feet and then vanished abruptly into the immense metallic sphere of Detroit, swelling outward more than a tenth of a mile from the Spindle to blot out all but a thin crescent of star-speckled blackness to one side. A little short of halfway between where they were standing and the northern extremity of Detroit, two raised, parallel lips ran around the surface of the Spindle and disappeared out of sight behind its curve in both directions to mark the ring of the Spin Decoupler system—the point at which the rotating structure that comprised the North Spindle, Hub and Rim joined the nonrotating assembly of South Spindle, Detroit and Pittsburgh.

Kim watched in mute fascination as the massive ribs of the Decoupler ring slid smoothly past one another at ten miles per hour. Her senses told her that she was stationary while Detroit and the rest of South Spindle were turning along with the background of stars, but she knew that in reality it was she and the part of Janus that lay north of the Spin Decoupler that were turning at a little under one revolution every minute. The huge solar dish that formed part of Detroit came slowly into view from beneath the Spindle, reached the bottom point of its plunge and was carried up and away out of sight again behind the curve of Detroit. Soon afterward it was followed by the far larger bulk of the half-mile-square Radiator Assembly projecting from Detroit diametrically opposite the solar dish, which passed them edge-on and extended away beyond the limit of the window’s viewing angle.

“Quite a sight, isn’t it,” Chris said at last. “After you’ve been cooped up in the Rim for a while, you begin to forget that Janus has got an outside to it. It makes you feel like a maggot that’s just poked its head outside its apple for the first time, doesn’t it.”