Mars Plus

Chapter 17 Crossing Orbits

Ellen Sorbel turned away from Jory's inert body lying on the table.

"Did you get it?" Lole asked, glancing at the Lethe circuitry.

"Yes. . . . Look, someone ought to go find Demeter. Would you take charge of that while I clean up?"

"Sure. She's probably at her hotel."

"Most likely. Bring her right here."

"Of course." He nodded and ducked through the connecting tunnel.

"How can I help?" Dr. Lee asked.

Sorbel pointed at the Creole. "Get my leads out of his head. Close him up."

"Do you want me to reconnect his—?"

She shook her head. "Doesn't matter, does it?"

"I'll do it anyway." Clearly, the doctor felt some troubling responsibility for the work he'd done this night.

"Suit yourself."

When the links between her computer and the boy had been cut, Ellen addressed herself to the material Lethe had captured. For this, she used a portable terminal, a folding screen and keyboard, instead of the virtual-reality gear she was more accustomed to as a cyber ghost. This would be low-level programming. Mechanics, not art.

On the screen, Lethe displayed Jory's access codes and transmission pattern: first as a frequency modulation, expressed in analog against the abscissas and ordinates on the face of an oscilloscope; then as an analyzed breakdown of distinct binary digits, in continuous string-form zeros and ones; finally as an interpreted code, in neat hexadecimal notation. The cyber had taken this transcription when Jory first awoke and tried to establish baseline contact with the grid. Now, any computer which reproduced this transmission exactly would be accepted by the grid as Jory den Ostreicher, maintenance worker out of Tharsis Montes and registered Creole.

When Ellen was finished, her unregistered cyber here would be able to pass.

Over the preceding four months, stealing time from her job as a data analyst and ghost, Sorbel had constructed a tipple—a sequence of interlinked programs that were lodged in various of the computers passing tokens on the grid. With the right command, the tipple would operate, initiating a cascade of failures among these machines and effectively taking the grid offline. This was ticklish work, because so much of human survival on Mars depended on the cyber network: for maintaining gas balance in the tunnels, for food processing and wastewater management, for operating the space fountain and orbital traffic control, for communicating with Earth and the rest of the Solar System. To disable the grid and not touch these processes, Ellen had erected a complex, self-organizing virus that was extremely selective.

Trouble was, each part of it was stored away as a null-priority program loop. A master program, her symphony conductor, was also stored in the grid— right under Wyatt s nose, in fact—to call up each piece in order and orchestrate its sequence of play. As a human computer ghost, Ellen Sorbel had written the code, and Ellen had placed it in the various machine archives, but Ellen-the-human couldn't call it. She couldn't even address the master program and tell it to begin the performance. Wyatt would be instantly suspicious of such activity, run a parallel review of it—at a rate about ten million times faster than she could push the keys down—and cut her off.

Wyatt might be blind to the nibblings of mice, but he could sure as hell spot a big old rat.

So, instead, Ellen would have to initiate the execution—if and when it became necessary—through a dummy persona. It had to be an access code that Wyatt would accept as a registered token-holder. In short, Joiy's access code.

When the time came, her programs would cut off the grid's higher functions, its collective intelligence and executive decision making, its administration of the planet's legal and social doctrines, its tap into corridor surveillance and human monitoring, but leave in place and operative the low-order functions that mechanically maintained the tunnel complexes. Or that was probably how it would work ... she hoped... according to her best professional guesstimate. With an untested virus, Ellen knew, you could never be one hundred percent sure of the outcome.

"Did you get it?' Lole asked again at her shoulder.

"Of course, chapter and verse. .. . Are you back so soon? Where's Demeter?"

"Be here in a minute. I sent one of the boys for her."

"I thought you'd go yourself."

"We've got things to talk about, before she comes." Lole turned deadly serious. "Jory gave us more than he knew."

"Sure, the grid's whole battle plan. It's going to seal off humanity by destroying the Earth fountains. That separates us into easily disposable chunks, doesn't it?"

"Obviously," he agreed. "It probably has something similar planned for our own fountain. Maybe that's what the drives are for on the new power satellite—to send it out on a parabolic orbit, ending up here, at Tharsis Montes."

Sorbel gave that notion some thought. "I'm not sure. Why cut a rope in two places, when one cut will do?"

"That would isolate us from Luna, Europa, the Belt Stations...."

"But those colonies aren't viable without massive support from Earth. Neither are we."

"Oh, hell, Ellen! We're totally self-supporting now! I thought that was a given. We all resent Earth's meddling in our affairs—their old territorial claims and their impulsive new terraforming projects. They're just a nuisance, from the Martian point of view Cut them off at the fountainhead and we'll do just fine. Better than fine. With the way open for us to supply Europa and the outer colonies, we'll—"

"We'll die on the vine, Lole. Sure, we're self-supporting, on a month-to-month basis. Maybe even year-to-year. But cut us off from the rare and refined materials and new technologies that regularly flow from Earth and we won't last long. Two, three years from now we'll be starving and suffocating up here. We'll petition to go back on any terms. The grid knows this, of course. It wrote the program on our economy."

"Then what are those engines for, on the power platform?" he asked.

"I have no idea why you'd rig that satellite to scoot. A sudden thrust would destroy its solar panels, fold them up like flypaper. Unless, of course, they're dummies, built for show—and they're not. I think I know the grid about as well as any human person, and I've found it's inherently conservative. The grid wouldn't waste Mars's precious resources—resources for which it ultimately claims stewardship—putting hectares of polymorphic silicon in orbit only to rip them off in the first second of operation."

"So it's still a mystery."

"Part of it, anyway. We do know about the plan to blow the fountains."

"Can you stop it?"

"I have the bullet, the gun, and now—with the access codes from Jorys systems—the trigger. I can initiate our virus well inside the sixty-eight minutes of orbital lag time needed to position those bombs. We can phage the grid's higher functions before it gets even close with them.. . . Everything else, though, is going to be a crap shoot."

"Good enough for my—"

"What's going on?" a voice asked from behind them.

Ellen turned to see a sleep-rumpled Demeter Coghlan being duck-walked into the secret room by one of Lole's security heavies.

"Miz Coghlan?"

"Yes, Terminal?" Demeter mumbled. "What is it now?"

"Miz Coghlan!"

Someone was shaking her shoulders, practically sliding her body around on the bedsheets. Damn it! Who left the door open? She gave orders not to be disturbed.

"Miz—"

"All right already I'm awake. I'm up!"

Demeter opened her eyes and stared into the face of someone she'd never . . . No, it was the heavy-set young man from the secret room, the one who had hit Jory and then walked away. He was bent over her now, with his big hands on her bare shoulders.

She glanced down to see how much of the sheet had slipped off her body, looked pointedly at his hands on her skin. "Do you mind?"

He withdrew them.

"Lole and Miss Ellen want you back in the—" He glanced at the terminal. "—back at the party." With that, the man stepped away from the bed and waited for her to get up.

"All right." She sighed. "I'll be along in a minute."

He would not take the hint and move.

"You run on ahead," she said, "and I'll meet you there."

"They told me I was to bring you. Special."

"Well, I'm not getting dressed with you standing there. Why don't you wait outside?"

The man's brows drew together in a doubtful frown.

"There's only the one door," she observed. "You think I'm going to leave through an air duct or something?"

He actually turned his head toward the grating, forty centimeters square and set high in the rock wall. Demeter would have to be a contortionist with a collapsible head to sneak out of the room that way.

"Go on," she said. "Shoo!"

As soon as the door closed behind him, Demeter leapt out of bed, found fresh underwear and a clean jumper, and rummaged through the bottom of the tiny closet for a pair of soft walking boots. The gallery over the water leading to the secret room was too slick and slimy to attempt in her slippers. Demeter knew she had no time to go down to the communal bathroom and splash water on her face, let alone take a shower. Her pet gorilla wasn't going to take his eyes off her for that long.

When she left the room, Demeter brushed past him and strode off down the corridor. He ran three steps behind and caught her arm with a bruising grip just above the elbow. She whirled on him, within the limits of movement he allowed.

"Look—what's your name?"

"Jeff."

"Jeff what?"

"Te Jing."

"Look, Jeff Te Jing. Am I a prisoner or something?"

'They said to bring you. I bring."

"Well, could you stop trying to give me tendinitis?"

Te Jing's face chewed over this request for three more paces. "You won't try to run?"

"Of course not. I want to see Lole and Ellen, too."

"Okay." He released the squeezing pressure on her arm, but his hand never broke contact.

"Jesus!" she breathed.

He took her over the water, down the dead-end corridor in the abandoned section of tunnels, and up to the blank steel door. The first room was empty now; the party really was over. As she passed the hanging curtain with the chemical toilet, Demeter veered off, thinking the basin would still be diere and she could at least wash up.

The sudden movement took Te Jing by surprise. He caught her in a half nelson and twisted until she dropped one knee to the ground.

"You promised," he said accusingly.

"Just to wash my hands."

"Aggh," he grunted, like a swearword.

Going through the short connecting tunnel, he put his hands on the back of her neck, pressing down hard on her spine, his thumbs splayed against her shoulder blades for lateral control. Demeter could barely creep along in that position. They used to do this to the prisoners at Matamoros, she remembered; it was called "frog marching" and felt as humiliating and painful as it looked.

By the time they emerged into the inner room, Demeter was downright angry. "Hey! What's going on?"

Ellen Sorbel and Lole Mitsuno looked up from the tete-a-tete they were having. Behind them, Dr. Lee was working alone over the operating table. The bronzed body on it—Jory's body—was totally inert with a gaping hole still showing in his head. The eyes, Demeter could see from her position near the floor, were open and fixed. He didn't seem to be breathing.

Ellen looked at Te Jing. "Was she at the hotel?"

"Yes, first try."

Ellen shifted to Demeter. "What were you doing?'

"Sleeping," Coghlan replied.

"Why?'

What a silly question that was! "Well, it's after midnight, isn't it? Besides, I wasn't feeling too good. Not after—" She gestured at Jory, still spread out on the table.

"Did you talk to anyone?"

"No, I went right to the hotel."

"Did you use the terminal in your room?"

"Not tonight. And I don't see what that— Oh, wait! I asked the machine not to let me be disturbed. Fat lot of good it did."

Ellen frowned. Clearly, something else was bothering her. "What do you mean by 'not tonight'?"

"Well, usually in the evening, just before going to bed, I file my reports with Dallas."

"What's in them?"

"Only things that happen during the day. People I meet and talk to. How my assignment is going—which is to find out more about the Valles development project."

"Are Lole and I in these reports?" Ellen asked.

"Only peripherally, I guess."

"Did you mention this room? Its shielding arrangements? The combination for the door lock?"

"No! Lole asked me not to tell. Why do you—?"

"There's been a leak, Demeter," Mitsuno said gently. "From what we've learned tonight, the grid knows things that only you had access to."

"That's absurd!" Demeter protested, but even she could hear the quaver in her voice.

Of course, Demeter had filed most of those reports with the Golden Lotus's terminal in interrogation mode. It was the easy way to dump her visual and verbal impressions, but she could spell out beforehand the subject vectors that the machine was to pursue. That was her safeguard against wasting valuable storage blocks and transmission time, not to mention Gregor's limited patience, with loose-lips syndrome. Of course, any artificial intelligence could override those pattern vectors if it really wanted to. But where would such motivation come from?

The grid, of course.

"Well, I might have ..." Demeter faltered. "That is to say. . She gave up and flapped her hands at her sides. "I don't know!"

Ellen Sorbel looked at her thoughtfully for what seemed a long time. "Do you talk in your sleep?" she asked finally.

Demeter gave the matter consideration. "I didn't used to. Well, my cousins and I shared the same bedroom, back in Austin. Nobody ever mentioned it."

"But you do now?"

"I guess. That is, I ... I usually fall asleep dictating my reports. Maybe something runs over. Maybe a little."

"Is this since your accident?" Dr. Lee asked, looking up from behind the operating table. "Like the trouble you have concentrating?'

"Yes, I suppose so."

Ellen rounded on her. "Tell me more about this famous accident of yours. 'Head trauma,' you told Dr. Lee. Was there brain damage?"

"Some. I lost a lot of motor control down my side opposite the injury, and the hearing went in that ear."

"How is it you're not affected now?" Sorbel asked.

"Well, they repaired me."

"How?"

"In the usual way, I guess. They grafted in a lattice of bio-interface chips that supplemented normal functioning and trained my cortex in new pathways."

Ellen whirled on Dr. Lee. "But you said she was clean!"

"She is!" the doctor asserted. "I did a full-body scan, which showed nothing. The site of that trauma displayed as—" He paused, obviously thinking before he went on. "—as a smooth insert surrounded by bone scarring. No sign of intrusion into cortical tissue. No active prosthetics at all."

Sorbel walked over to the table, picked up a handheld electronic device—it was a multimeter shaped like a wand—and punched a control sequence into its tiny keypad. As she brought the device back over to where Demeter was standing, Coghlan could see its digital display on one face and a one-centimeter-square speaker grille. Ellen raised the wand, brought it up against the side of Demeter's head.

The unit started warbling as it passed her shoulder, shrieked as it neared her temple.

"Let me see that." Dr. Lee stripped off his surgical gloves, stepped around the table bearing Jorys body, and reached for the meter. He examined the numbers on the display.

"What—?" Demeter started to ask.

"Electromagnetic field strength," Sorbel explained shortly.

"That's much more involved than anything I saw with my office scanner," the doctor said.

"Your office system is tied into the grid, isn't it?" Ellen asked.

"Yes, of course."

"Oh, sweet Jesus!" Lole groaned. He reached over, touched Coghlan's shoulder gently, and dropped his hand. "Demeter, you're wetware!"

She recoiled from him. "What do you mean?"

"They've wired up your head," Ellen told her coldly. "Everything you've done has been under their compulsion."

"'They'? Who are you talking about?" Demeter was becoming truly frightened now.

"The machines. The grid."

"I'm not one of them!"

"Of course you are. You're their pawn. Nothing else fits."

Back by the operating table, Dr. Lee picked up a hypodermic and began metering a dose of something—Demeter didn't know what but was sure it wouldn't do her any good. They would all be afraid of the grid's retaliation now; Lole had explained about that. And the first thing they would do is neutralize the machines' supposed spy. Neutralize her.

Jory's spreadeagled body hovered at the edge of her awareness. Sorbel and Mitsuno had killed the Creole only because he had pestered Demeter about this secret place of theirs. If they now thought she was an active danger to them—this "wetware" thing—then she was next.

Demeter bolted.

She grabbed Ellen by the shoulders and threw her into Lole. The two of them staggered backward, clawing for their own balance.

Dr. Lee looked up from his preparations, face a dull-white blank.

Coghlan spun on the balls of her feet and came nose to nose with Jeff Te Jing. He already had his arms spread, hands out, trying to block her. Which left him wide open .. .

The training she'd received in Dallas was good to the point of being a conditioned reflex. Demeter's left knee came up automatically; her shin pumped out; her toes stiffened like a ballerina's—and the arch of her instep caught the man squarely between the legs.

Before he could react, that foot snapped back and stamped down, planting itself against the rock floor; she swung her hips in a tight half-circle, cocking her pelvis to the right; her free leg raised in a jackknife that sent her foots outside edge upward in a smooth, shallow curve—and her heel lodged among the small bones and cartilage in his throat. Before he could grab her extended limb, Demeter finished the combination with a flailing, high-stepping one-two, like a can-can dancer s finale, and smashed the balls of her left foot, right foot against his forehead. The force of those blows, weak as they were, being third and fourth in the set, united with the involuntary thrusts of his own body as Jeff doubled over in the gathering pain.

On the last one, Demeter heard a crack like a rock splitting dry wood.

Without bothering to see if he could follow, she slid around the man and vanished down the connecting tunnel.