Cyber Rogues (49 page)

When the hatch was free, he pushed gently with one hand while keeping a firm grip on one of the protruding studs to prevent it from floating away completely. It moved fairly easily. He nudged it out farther until he could work his fingers around the edge, then lifted it sufficiently to bring one side of his helmet into line with the gap.

“It looks like we’re in the main core-well,” he said after a few seconds. “Pretty near where I figured. We’re right next to what looks like one of the primary capacitor banks for the lasers. So we weren’t too far out at all. We’re inside the fusion plant. All we have to do now is get to the guts of it . . . either the control room or the oscillator bay.”

“See any signs of our mutual friends?”

Dyer eased the hatch open farther and craned his neck to take in as much of the surroundings as could be seen from that angle.

“No, I can’t . . . It seems strange. I’d have thought it would have had lots of stuff back here to protect this of all places.”

“Maybe it’s getting overconfident.”

There was no reply for a few seconds. Then Dyer said, “There’s something else odd too. There are lots of pipes and cables outside that look as if they run right across the outside of the hatch, But they couldn’t, because I wouldn’t have been able to open it. They all cut clean off right at the edge here. They can’t be doing anything.”

“Do they carry on across the outside of the hatch?”

“I don’t know yet. Anyhow, we didn’t come here to study the fittings. I’m going out. Get ready in case I need a shove. I’m not sure if I can squeeze past all this junk.”

After a lot of wriggling and squirming, he managed to work the upper part of his body through and paused to catch his breath before hauling himself out as far as his waist. He halted there and surveyed the surroundings again. He was looking along the outside of a dense mass of cables and pipes that stretched away out of sight in both directions. The clearance between the core and the surrounding wall of the core-well was only a foot or so except for where a narrow access tunnel was recessed into one side of the wall opposite the hatch. Lucky, he thought, and then realized that it couldn’t have been otherwise; there was no other way that the device, whatever it was, could have been put there. The hatch was floating a short distance away from him against the far wall of the tunnel. He turned it over curiously and found, as he’d half expected, that its outer surface carried a set of dummy pipes and cables that matched the ones interrupted by the opening he was looking out of. Evidently great pains had been taken to camouflage its existence. But why . . . ?

He shrugged inside his suit, took one final look around, and pulled himself out into the tunnel. Laura handed out the two M25s and the other equipment, and began worming her way over the obstructions and through the hatch.

From the position of the capacitor bank, Dyer had managed to identify where they were. To reach the control room, they would have to go back about twenty feet along the tunnel to where the core-well intersected a wide cross-gallery that connected the fusion plant to the Power Distribution Center on the far side of the well. From there, unless
Spartacus
had made some major alterations since the last time Dyer had been in this part of Janus, access to the fusion plant control room could be gained from the right-hand continuation of the gallery. He helped Laura clear of the hatch and indicated the direction that they would have to take. Laura nodded and they began drifting back along the tunnel without speaking. When they had covered only a few feet, they both froze in the same instant.

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 consequence 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.”