Reality Matrix Effect (9781310151330) (38 page)

Yes, Rayna knew how angry people were.
She saw it up close at the debate. “But if you have the
proof....”

 “
You don’t understand,” Marsden
said, fixing her with haunted blue-gray eyes. “We can provide them
with the facts, but we can’t make the politicians face those facts.
And we can’t make the public believe them, either.”

   
He removed an
Astobac cigarette from a case in his pocket, lit up and took a
puff. As he exhaled, the smoke reacted with the air and broke down
into its component elements, dispersing harmlessly. “It’s much
easier to blame a scapegoat than to face a complicated problem,” he
continued. “And over the last few months, the colonies have become
a handy scapegoat for just about every problem we have here on
Earth.”

Rayna wanted to disagree, but she knew
Marsden was right. “Just what’s the latest threat?” she
asked.

 
Milgrom nodded at Marsden. “Go
ahead Derek. You can explain it better than I can.”

Marsden puffed on his cigarette before
speaking. “Do you know what a ZAP miner is?”

The question took Rayna by surprise.
“Why, no. I don’t think I ever—”

“ZAP miners,” he repeated. “The
‘Z-A-P’ stands for Zhang Amplified Packbeam. Zhang was a colonial
engineer. He figured out that mining operations would be most
efficient if preliminary excavation work was done by precision,
computer-targeted, space-mounted lasers, leaving the more detailed
work of actual mineral extraction for robots and colonists using
smaller tools on the asteroid’s surface.”

Rayna wondered why Marsden should
launch into a lesson on colonial mining in the midst of a crisis.
“What does all that have to do with—”

“Bear with me for a minute,” Marsden
said with a wave of his cigarette. “The problem was that laser
beams tended to spread out too much over orbital distances. So
Zhang came up with a new system that packed laser-generated light
waves into dense, red beams that could slice through the hardest
terrain. These days, zappers are very common in the mining
colonies.”

“I still don’t see what all that has
to do with the Nitinol crisis and the faked
communications.”

Marsden took a deep drag on his
cigarette. “The zappers can be programmed to hit any target. Even
on Earth.”

Rayna froze, her coffee cup halfway to
her mouth.

“According to the latest message,”
Milgrom said, “the ‘colonists’ have sent a number of modified ZAP
miners into orbit around Earth, and more are on the way. The
message says they will be used against unnamed targets here if
Earth takes any hostile action against the colonies.”  Milgrom
looked solemnly at Rayna. “They didn’t bother to define what they
meant by ‘hostile.’  It could mean anything from trying to
recapture the Nitinol by force to blockading the R-4
Sector.”

Rayna thought furiously.

 “
They’re in Earth orbit now,”
Marsden said. “Must have left R-4 before the Nov. 1 deadline, or
they couldn’t have reached us already. That’s sure to make tensions
worse once the public realizes it.”

“But how did the—?”

“How did the zappers get
through?  That’s an easy one. No one ever thought of ZAP
miners as weapons, or of Earth as being at war. Everyone apparently
figured somebody else had authorized repair or service checkout for
the mining equipment. There was nothing to prevent the zappers from
taking critical positions around the world.”

Rayna felt the dream-shadow closing
in. “But there must be something we can do. Knock them out of the
sky, maybe.”

“Unfortunately,” said Milgrom, “we
can’t knock them all out at once. If we blow one up, another could
still devastate parts of the planet. And we don’t have any idea
which areas are at risk.”

Rayna shook her head. “It must be a
bluff,” she decided.

“All we know for sure,” said Marsden,
“is that there really are ZAP miners surrounding the Earth, and the
only place you’d normally find so many zappers is in a mining
colony. The public would know that, too.”

“Maybe anti-Earth feeling is running
as high in the colonies as anti-colony feeling is here,” Rayna
said.

“Could be,” Marsden replied. “From
what I saw when I was analyzing the messages, our fake colonists
were sending phony messages to R-4 as well as from the Asteroid
Belt. No way of telling just what those messages said in the name
of Earth. Might have been pretty inflammatory. But the message
about the zappers didn’t come from any colony. It originated on
Earth. Then it  was rerouted  through the colonial branch
of the CDN, so that a casual check would confirm the
codes.”

“There’s something else,” said
Milgrom. “Something that may prove just as dangerous as the ZAP
miners themselves.”

Rayna looked at the CDN director
expectantly.

“According to the message—which was
sent to all Earth’s major news services at the same time it was
sent to us—according to the message, the ZAP miners will be
triggered by colonial sympathizers here on Earth.” 

Milgrom didn’t have to explain what
that meant. Distrust was already rampant. With this announcement,
almost everyone would become suspect. One thing was certain: 
It would make peaceful contact with the colonies nearly impossible.
Anyone talking about peace was likely to be branded an ally of the
colonists and a potential mass murderer.

Rayna sank back in her chair, suddenly
drained. “Then there’s nothing we can do. Tauber’s won.”

Marsden’s face went white, and his
cigarette dropped from his hand. “Who did you say?”

“Tauber,” Rayna repeated. “Hank
Tauber, I think. Or Henry Tauber. Something like that. He seems to
be the brains behind the fake messages, the Nitinol diversion,
Rensselaer’s involvement… everything. Apparently he used to be a
lieutenant in some disbanded unit of the Merchant
Fleet.”

 “
The Third Circuit, Fourth
Asteroid Belt Run,” Marsden droned. “The Three-C, Four-A. My old
unit.”

Milgrom turned to her assistant. “Did
you know this man, Derek?”

“I knew him. We used to be friends. I
knew he’d gone sour after the accident—he was hurt the same time I
was—but I never figured he would....”  He broke off and gazed
down at the desk top. “I knew him, Althea.”

The three of them sat quietly for
several moments.

“So where does that leave us?” asked
Rayna.

In the ensuing stillness, she could
almost see Milgrom’s mind analyzing the situation—breaking the
problem down into byte-sized pieces and examining each one
separately, then trying to put them all together once
more.

“Where does that leave us?” Milgrom
repeated. “It leaves us with a big job to do, but between Derek’s
communications trace and whatever you can tell us about Tauber and
his activities, we may be onto something.”

Rayna wasn’t convinced. “It all seems
hopeless.”

“Tough, yes, but not hopeless,”
Milgrom said. “If there’s one thing I’ve learned in my life, it’s
that there’s always hope.”

Tauber pounded his right fist into his
left palm and angrily cut off the HV reception. In an instant, the
distinguished, gray-haired woman in the wheelchair disappeared from
his living room.

“Bitch!” he called out. “Goddamn
bitch!”

His body shook with fury, his gaze
focused on the spot just vacated by the three-dimensional image of
Althea Milgrom. At this moment he wanted nothing more than to
strangle that damned cripple. He was on the verge of losing
control, and he knew it. And that made him all the
angrier.

Maybe she really doesn’t know
anything, he told himself. Maybe she’s still just trying to placate
the masses, just like she’s been doing since December.

But even as the thought formed, Tauber
knew better. Milgrom had mentioned enough of the details to
demonstrate that this was no case of wishful thinking or calming
invention on her part; she
knew
about the
messages! 

True, she’d been singing essentially
the same song for the past three months. Nobody believed her, of
course. Oh, he was a little alarmed at first, but when no
confirmation followed from independent technical experts, and
Milgrom became increasingly isolated in her call to reestablish
communications with the colonies, Tauber had stopped worrying and
let himself enjoy the chaos he’d wrought. Her efforts seemed to be
backfiring, and it was all working to Strong Man’s advantage. What
was there to worry about?

 
Plenty, it now appeared. Now
Milgrom had convinced the Secretary-General to try some
experimental hyperwave communications system to establish real-time
contact with the colonists. In order to get that die-hard,
cover-your-ass politician to do that, she must have had some pretty
convincing proof!

How could she possibly have figured it
all out?  Only five people were familiar with the
code-switching technique Tauber used to scramble the Earth-colony
transmissions. Jerrald, Kerner and Aldomar were in on Operation
Strong Man and knew how to keep their mouths shut. Zeigler died
last year when a new rocket engine he was testing blew up. And
Derek Marsden might as well be dead. The last Tauber had heard, his
erstwhile friend was struggling through retraining with little hope
of ever finding a decent civilian job.

At the thought of Marsden, Tauber’s
stomach muscles tightened into a knot, but he resolutely ignored
the sensation and walked over to his off-line computer. Tauber had
built the machine himself, making good use of his old Fleet
training. As a free-standing unit that wasn’t tied into the massive
Consolidated Data Network,  it offered some definite
advantages.

No CDN hookup for Baby,
Tauber
recalled thinking when he first decided to build the computer.
I
won’t bother the CDN, and the CDN won’t bother me.

But the CDN
was
bothering him.
At least, its director was bothering him. She was bothering him a
lot.

“That bitch!” 

He flipped the power switch to the
“on” position, inserted a disk into the computer’s interactive
optical drive, and called up a report on the status of Operation
Strong Man. All the key people were right where they belonged,
doing just what they were supposed to be doing. Anti-colony
incidents were increasing, and many countries had imposed tight
restrictions on the activities of anyone remotely associated with
the colonies. While there were no legal restrictions here in the
United States, social pressures were just as effective in limiting
Astie support. By now, everybody knew all about the zappers—and
about the fact that somebody on Earth was doing the colonies’ dirty
work for them. Despite her efforts, or more likely, because of
them, Milgrom had become a lightning rod for anti-colony
sentiment.

She has guts, he thought. I’ll give
her that much.

He considered the situation somberly,
his psyche automatically going into the failure-proof, pep-talk
mode he had trained himself to adopt whenever self-doubt plagued
him.
None of this will do her any good. Scapegoats are too
handy.

That was the basis of his whole
plan:  Give the people someone to hate—someone to blame all
their problems on—and then provide the leadership that’ll “save”
them from their foe. The technique had worked throughout history.
Only Tauber wouldn’t make the mistake so many others had made. He
wouldn’t turn himself into a target by identifying himself. He
would run the show quietly, from behind the scenes. Let Rensselaer
be the public hero. That was all right with Tauber. As long as
Rensselaer remembered his place. As long as Rensselaer remembered
who made him—and who could break him. As long as he remembered that
today’s hero can be tomorrow’s goat.

We’ll move up the time table.
Everything’s about ready, anyway. It would only have been a matter
of a few weeks more in any case. We just have to make sure we do
the job before they activate the hyperwave system. 

 
Tauber narrowed his eyes in
determination and examined some more data. You could cram an awful
lot of information onto one of these new dense-pack optical disks.
He had just about everything he needed right here in just this one
small disk. True, he couldn’t pull other network records, or
cross-reference material from different sources, or access the
international communications system unless he tied back into the
CDN hookup. Still, he’d even managed to get around some of those
limitations by copying CDN records to an optical disk. He patted
the compact gray box that contained the computer’s workings. Baby,
here, gave him computer power without potential CDN oversight—which
was exactly the way he liked it. Power without anyone looking over
his shoulder.

 
He instructed the computer to
scroll through the display slowly. After several seconds, he froze
the screen image, a personnel report. Right. It all looked good.
Then his eye reached the last name on the list.
Wraggon, Charles
J.

“Fucking asshole!” 

It took brains to program those robots
so they would booby trap the Nitinol warehouse. Tauber knew that.
He also knew that Wraggon was like an unsecured shipboard laser
cannon with a broken safety mechanism. If you can’t repair the
safety or lock down the cannon....  The confrontation had been
inevitable.