The Credulity Nexus (36 page)

“
This is Partway Control.” A different
voice. An angry voice. “What the hell are you doing? You can't just
manoeuvre like that. You're putting lives in danger. Do you hear
me, Captain Campos?”

Lanham smiled
sadly. Poor old Campos would end a fine career in disgrace and
ignominy. His name would go into the history books as that of a
murderer and madman, but it was the best solution, under the
circumstances. He turned on the viewscreen, and the angry space
traffic controller sprang into view.

“
This is Campos,” he said in the man's
Texan drawl. “Partway, you should give up trying to stop me. You
can't do it, and you'll only be wasting your time. This is the only
way. I can't go back now.”

True, of
course, since that idiotic young woman Celestina sent had failed to
capture the virus, and failed even to die blowing up the town. He
should not have relied on Celestina. The woman was deranged. But
what else could he have done?

“
Campos! I'll have your license for this.
I'm calling the cops. Do you hear?”

“
Demons and monsters have taken over the
city,” Lanham said, trying to sound as crazy as he could. “That's
why they have it under quarantine. That's why I have to do this
terrible thing.”

“
Campos, what the hell are you–”

Lanham cut the
connection. That's all they needed. It was thin, but it would have
to do.

The ship was
drifting slowly downward. Fifty-six thousand kilometres below, the
town of Heinlein was in turmoil as its citizens tried to flee the
virus Cordell had unleashed. Lanham could not let a single one
escape. The town had to be burnt to ashes. A nuke would have done
it, but, failing that, a spaceship massing over one hundred
thousand kilogrammes diving into it, at a velocity of thirteen
thousand metres per second, would do just as well. Lanham had
already done the calculations in his head. The kinetic energy of
his impact would be about equivalent to a four megaton nuclear
explosion.

He gave the
engines a kick and the ship dropped faster. To get the right
attitude, velocity and trajectory for a dive into the city, the
ship would need to do one full orbit of the Moon. In about two
hours, Heinlein would be gone. So little time left for Lanham – or
whoever he was – to live.

He tuned out
his anxiety. This was no time to be a slave to human survival
instincts. Lanham must do what was necessary for the survival of
Omega Point and transhumans everywhere. If the humans didn't buy
his impromptu ploy and a war ensued, so be it. The risk was better
than the certainty of destruction if Cordell could manipulate the
credulity nexus to his ends.

Partway
Station moved past above him, a knot of lights on the bundle of
tethers leading up from the grey moon below to the giant platform
above. Two hours, and the future course of his people would be
changed forever.

“
What do you mean, it's broken
orbit?”

Rik, Freymann
and Burleigh were in a police pod, being driven to UNPF
headquarters. Considering that they had just saved the city, their
treatment, under the instructions of Major Herez, had not been what
Rik had hoped for.

Burleigh held up a hand, still listening
to a report on his cogplus. “The
Phenomenon of Man
changed its orbit. At least an hour ago.
Ground radar is tracking it. It went to a lower orbit, and it
didn't have a flight plan.”

“
Why on Earth–”

“
Captain Campos made a brief statement, it
seems.” He touched Rik's and Freymann's hands and played back the
captain's last words.

Rik couldn't make sense of it. He'd met
Campos just a few times but his impression of the man had been one
of stability and down-to-Earth good sense. “He's not some kind of
deranged nutcase,” he said. “He's...”
He's pretending to be a deranged
nutcase
, he
realised.
But why?

“
It's because they didn't have another
fallback plan,” Freymann said. “They're having to
improvise.”

There was a
silence as they all considered what that might mean.

“
I thought you said they weren’t fanatical
enough to sacrifice their own lives?” Burleigh said.

“
Who knows? Maybe they are.” Rik remembered
the scary Celestina and the cool, calculating Lanham. It wasn't a
big sample to judge them by, but neither, in their own way, was
quite sane. Perhaps that's what happened to a human mind if you
locked it away in a metal box and sent it into space. Or maybe it
just took that kind of mind to want to live forever. He reached
into his pocket and touched the small cylinder there.

“
How long before the ship comes round
again?”

“
Less than an hour,” Burleigh
said.

“
We need to get to the surface right
now.”

“
We'll be no safer up there.” Burleigh's
voice was full of defeat.

“
Just get me to the surface and we'll
see.”

The lieutenant
looked ready to argue, but he didn't. A weariness seemed to have
settled over the big cop, as if he'd used up all his resistance
getting them this far and now he was ready to accept his fate. Rik
wondered if it was something Major Herez had said to him in their
recent exchange. Something had depressed the big guy.

“
Everything we've done up till now will be
for nothing if you don't help us,” Freymann said. She placed a hand
on the lieutenant's arm and looked at him with a deep intensity. It
took Rik a moment to realise that she was pleading his case with no
other reason than that she trusted him.

Burleigh
sighed. “There are shafts,” he said. “Part of an emergency
transportation system.” He caught Rik's puzzled frown and said,
“They're secret. The idea is that security crews can travel around
the surface and drop down into Heinlein at key points. You've seen
how slow it is trying to get around down here. We need something
faster. It's not finished yet, but there's a shaft near here that
goes all the way up.”

They set off
immediately, and Burleigh took them into a nondescript building
with no markings and a fancy security system. Inside were racks of
pressure suits, all with UNPF logos.

“
I hope you don't actually want to walk on
the surface, Rik,” Burleigh said, striding past them. “Because
they're all pure oxygen suits and there isn't time to go through
the depressurisation cycle.”

“
Just get me up there.”

“
OK.”

They entered
an airlock big enough to take a squad of soldiers in full battle
dress, with doors big enough to drive an armoured car through, and
cycled through into another room. A spiral ramp led up into
darkness.

“
It's not quite finished yet, else we could
take a buggy up the ramp. For now, that's the only way up.” He
pointed to a narrow ladder set into the wall. It disappeared
through a hole in the ceiling.

“
How far down are we?” Freymann asked. Rik
had noticed that she had been limping since the brawl at The Harsh
Mistress. His own left arm and shoulder hurt pretty badly. He
wondered if either of them could make a long climb.

“
We're four levels down. The top level is
only a couple of hundred metres below the surface, but we could
easily be half a kilometre below ground here.”

Rik felt his
body protest. It had been through a lot lately and a half-kilometre
vertical climb was not going to help. “Let's get started,” he said.
Even if it killed him, he had to get up that shaft to the surface.
If he didn't, everyone in Heinlein would die.

Burleigh set
off up the ladder without another word.

“
I'll go last,” Freymann said. “It'll be
quicker.”

“
You don't have to come at all, Fariba.
Either this will work, or it won't. You might as well stay here and
rest.”

She shook her
head and smiled. “Save it for a damsel in distress, Rik. I'm
coming. Now stop wasting time.”

He smiled back
at her and, on a sudden impulse, stepped forward and kissed her.
She kissed him back and, for a moment, he forgot all about the
spaceship powering its way down towards them.

Then he
remembered again.

He stepped
back. “I'll see you at the top,” he said, and started to climb.

-oOo-

Lanham felt the acceleration ease and then
stop. The engines had fired for almost six minutes, dumping the
ship's orbital velocity, at first gently and then with increasing
ferocity, until
The Phenomenon of Man
was falling like a stone, following a steep parabolic
descent towards the doomed city below. He checked the proximity
radar. His rate of approach was increasing, the slight lunar
gravity was feeble at this altitude, but that would gradually
change.

For a while,
there had been the sounds of shouting and commotion in the corridor
outside the bridge. The human members of the crew had not been
briefed on this contingency. Eventually, the sounds of stunners
discharging had brought silence. All the uploads on the ship would
already have sent an incremental update of their minds by tightbeam
back to Omega Point. There, the data would be integrated with
copies taken before the ship set off. They would die here, yet live
again back home. If there ever was a war with the humans, and it
might be inevitable now, Lanham's people would have many
advantages. Hopefully, they would be sufficient.

“
Captain Campos?”

Lanham heard
Rik's voice directly inside his head. If it had not been Drew, or
one of a handful of others, the ship would not have allowed the
signal through.

“
Mr. Drew. What could you possibly want?”
He wondered idly how a nobody like Drew had persuaded the
authorities to allow him to communicate with the ship. Perhaps Drew
had been spending some of the money to which Lanham had given him
access. Perhaps the Heinlein Administration was simply desperate,
and letting anyone have a go.

“
I want you to change course, Captain. I
want you to go back into orbit and let these people live. I know
you're following Lanham's orders, but Lanham is wrong. There is no
retrovirus down here. No infection. There might not even be such a
thing as the credulity nexus, for all I know. Cordell couldn't make
it work. He was just using the idea of the virus to make you guys
do something stupid. Like destroying Heinlein.”

The man was
panting as he spoke, undergoing some very strenuous exercise.
Lanham imagined him running, trying to get to the spaceport to make
his escape. Lanham considered revealing himself, just to torment
Drew further, but he had to keep up his silly captain-gone-mad
pretence for whoever else might be eavesdropping.

“
You sound like a demon to me, Mr. Drew,
spreading lies, trying to confuse me.”

“
Stop pissing about, Campos. Lanham's going
to kill all these people for nothing. Do you really want that on
your conscience? Can you really do that? You're not a monster like
Lanham. There's still a decent, human side to your nature. For
God's sake man, think about what you're doing!”

Lanham smiled,
pleased with himself. He had made the right decision substituting
his mind for Campos'. The captain might well have been too
squeamish to do what he had to, especially with people like Drew
appealing to his humanity.

It occurred to
Lanham that, if more humans were like Rik Drew, then none of this
would have been necessary. If the rest of them could be so
open-minded and intelligent, instead of blindly prejudiced. If they
could accept that transhumans were just people too – better in so
many ways, of course, but still basically the same – then this
pointless conflict would never have arisen. It was a shame that one
of the few sensible humans he'd met in decades had to die with the
rest.

He blocked all
signals. There was really nothing else he wanted to hear from any
of them. They had made their case, such as it was. In the end it
came down to this: Lanham did not believe that Cordell could have
been so devious and smart as to have faked the whole credulity
nexus affair. The retrovirus must therefore be real. The city of
Heinlein must therefore be infected. Lanham had just one chance
left to cauterise the infection, and this was it. It had to be
taken.

He glanced
again at the rate of descent display, pleased to see how much it
had climbed.

“
What do you plan to do up there?” Freymann
shouted up to him.

Rik looked
down at her. She was falling farther behind all the time. He
couldn't be sure, but she seemed to be climbing with only one leg
now, letting the other hang loosely beneath her. The strain on her
arms must be enormous, but she kept coming.

“
I had a fallback plan of my own,” he said,
taking a moment to rest and lower his left arm. The pain in his
shoulder had gone beyond burning agony, to the point where it
seemed more like an incandescent numbness in his mind. But the arm
was still working, and that was all that mattered.

They had been
climbing with very few pauses for over twenty minutes now, and Rik
estimated that they were just a little past the halfway mark. That
they could keep on at that rate for another twenty minutes seemed
impossible. He was drenched with sweat, and his arms and legs were
trembling. In Earth's gravity such a climb would have been
impossible. Even on the Moon, it was far worse than he had imagined
it could be.