Mars Plus

Chapter 19 Back Up the Beanstalk

Seemingly of its own accord—but actually under the grid's guidance—the walker approached the base of the space fountain. The vehicle strode confidently around to the north wall of the perimeter enclosure, and there it paused. After a moment's calculation, the machine moved forward slowly. But still it stopped occasionally and pushed its nose at this or that cast panel of sand-blasted concrete. It was seeking something invisible to human or Cyborg eyes in the outer wall, like a dog sniffing a row of identical fenceposts, trying to find the one with exactly the right scent.

Although he knew the grid was looking for an opening, Roger Torraway was unable to assist in this effort. The Mars nexus ran most of the fountain's routine functions out of its most distant and least dynamic cyber modules. Their image of the fountain was totally operational, shaped by numbers that represented energy flowing in megawatts and cargo allotments moving in tonnes per meter per second. Of the towers layout, its plot plan showing various access points into the base structure, these cybers were ignorant. Any view they might have of the physical plant was internal, diagramed from the traffic carried on inside the feeder systems. They had never seen the foundation from the outside, let alone through the video pickups of a walker that ambled and bobbed over the sand, dodging rocks.

Even though his head was braced at an odd angle, in preparation for any sudden moves by the captives sitting in front of him, Roger could still see out through the walkers forward windows. In his peripheral field, he watched a lozenge-shaped passenger pod rise smoothly from the hidden gap between the perimeter wall and the gray side of the fountain itself. In two clicks the pod was above the top edge of the windows and gone from sight, on its way to the upper atmosphere. He would have told the grid that the walker was nearly aligned on one of the tower tracks, maybe even the right one—if he could have told the grid anything.

The walker ignored the rising pod and kept poking at the wall.

"What's happening?" Demeter whispered to Mitsuno. "Is he lost or something?"

"I don't know." The hydrologist sounded worried.

Roger himself had to keep mute.

If he could have answered, he might have explained that while most of the cargo riding up and down the fountain went in sealed pods, the builders had provided accommodation for containerized freight and pieces of machinery that were larger and heavier than the standard elevator car. In such cases, the goods were flat-loaded onto a gyro-stabilized platform, anchored against slippage, and sent naked into the vacuum. The grid now wanted to put the walker on such a cargo stage, but first it had to find the entry point into the surf ace loading bay.

And it was doing that by the process of trial and error, which grated intolerably on Roger's human-originated and efficiency-minded sensibilities. If only the grid would release him, let him guide the walker manually—but this was too much trust for the machines to show, even to him.

Ever since his encounter with Dorrie out at Harmo-nia Mundi, Rogers systems had been acting strangely, moving him of their own volition. He was like a marionette being jerked around on its strings. That sensation had horrified him, especially when against his wall he had manhandled Lole Mitsuno—whom Roger actually liked as an honest technician, though a human—and then herded him and Demeter Coghlan up the ramp and into the walker. Torraway knew the grid was using him, accessing his muscles and senses through an override on his backpack interface. It was the same override that let Dorrie appear to Roger and guide him when a consensus of the three cybers governing his sensorium observed or analyzed a potential danger. Now the grid had gotten into his systems through that same keyhole. Roger was hopping mad about it but helpless to change anything.

At last the walker found the fencepost with the right scent. Roger would have laughed, if he could. The access point was a steel door, painted gray like the rest of the concrete wall or the towers superstructure, but outlined with bold yellow-and-black stripes. Any human or Cyborg eye would have spotted the warning border from a couple of hundred meters away. But the grid was using the walkers other sensors—its radio receiver, probably—to search for something more sub-de and meaningful to a machine intelligence, like the magnetic anomaly of the steel panel or the hum of its servomotors.

The grid unlocked the tower door from the inside. The bolts made a clang that Torraway could feel distantly through the walkers deck. The door split and swung outward. As soon as there was clearance for the vehicle's extended pads, it ambled forward into the darkness.

"Where are we going?" Demeter asked aloud. "Lole, you know, don't you?"

"I think we're going to find out firsthand what the grid did with that cargo of explosives," Mitsuno answered.

"Are we hostages?'

"Looks like it."

The walker advanced through a gray twilight, illuminated partly by the glimmer of dawn that came off the desert outside the still-open doors, partly by the star-shine that filtered down from the gap around the base of the fountain structure. Roger wished he could move, if only to press himself up against the walker's windshield and look down ahead of those plodding feet. The grid would assume that the cargo platform was now aligned with this level in this bay because it had issued orders to that effect and received no subsequent error messages. That didn't mean the elevator stage was necessarily in place.

If the walker was going to step off into empty space, tumbling Roger and his friends sixty meters into the fountain's maintenance subbasement, he wanted to be the first to know about it. Maybe he could brace Demeter and Lole somehow, keep them from breaking their necks. But of course he was frozen in his crouch, powerless to intercede.

The timbre of the walker's footsteps changed. The thud of spring-steel pads on dull concrete became the boom of those same hardpoints against huge metallic plates. They were on the platform.

Pushing its nose to within a meter of the tower wall, its front end just fitting between the two tracks of the mass driver, the walker used every centimeter of the lift's available space. Roger could feel it shifting backward and forward, making microadjustments in the placement of its pads for clearance. The grid was cutting its tolerances extremely fine today.

When the machine was finally in position, it dropped a full three meters. Demeter let out a little squeak of fright. But Torraway knew it was simply moving into a more stable crouch on the platform, much like his own posture. As soon as the fuselage stopped rocking on its suspension, dogs around the perimeter of the deck clamped onto the pads and uprights, anchoring the vehicle in place.

"Lole . . ." Demeter began, and Roger could read the dread in her voice. "Is the hull of this thing sealed against vacuum ?"

"Well. .." Mitsuno stopped to think. "Nearly so. I mean, Mars s atmospheric pressure at ground level is about one percent of Earth's. That's close enough to vacuum it makes no difference."

"Uh-huh." She didn't sound convinced. "I guess I have to accept that. You're breathing this air, too."

While she spoke, the side of the tower began to slip down past their window. The wall's surface was so plain and featureless that after that first blur of motion it virtually disappeared, becoming useless as a measure of their upward speed. The press of added weight from the acceleration soon faded out, too. Roger had to push the readouts from strain gauges built into his knees and legs in order sense their rate of climb: now meters per second, building smoothly toward kilometers per second.

As they rose, Torraway felt a strange thing happen: the iron hand that had compelled his movements over the past hour seemed to be releasing him. The connection with the grid was fading. He wondered what could be causing it. Not the grid itself, because it was accustomed to using him casually, like any daughter cyber which had been subordinated to the program hierarchy. Neither reason nor compassion would inspire the grid to let him go. Thus, something was taking him out from under its control.

Of course, the interruption would not arise out of sheer distance as the platform moved away from the nexus buried in Tharsis Montes. The grid's span of control, extended by packet radio repeaters, extended over the breadth of Mars and, with fiberoptic junctions, up the full height of the fountain to oversee all its operations. The nexus administered the satellites in their separate orbits as well.

Then Roger remembered that the fountain was supported by the inertia of thousands, or perhaps millions, of ferrite hoops that were shot aloft at great speed. Their passage would create a powerful magnetic field. And so would the mass drivers that pulled and pushed the cargo pods and this platform along the exterior rails. The conflicting fields would block radio signals into Torraway's backpack computer.

Roger flexed and extended his fingers, twisted his wrists, tensed the arches of his feet, unbent his knees, and stood slowly against the microaccelerations of the walker's cabin. He moved slowly, because even steel muscles can cramp from unexpected exertion.

"Lole, look!" Demeter husked. "What's he going to do to us?"

Torraway experimented with his voice circuits, to make sure they were his own again.

"Nothing," he said at last. "Demeter, I'm terribly sorry about all this. I had to break our deal."

Ellen Sorbel hovered in the background, watching and waiting to assist, as Dr. Lee cut into Jeff Te Jing's throat.

The doctor was trying to open a passage by which the young man could breathe; otherwise he would drown in the blood seeping from his crushed larynx. With the selection of instruments and drugs at hand, chosen and measured out for the one operation on Jory's systems, Wa Lixin had explained that he was working without painkillers and with barely enough disinfectant to clean his incision point. For the probable concussion and bruising of Te Jing's pericardium, the doctor could only rely on the patient's youth and natural strength.

Together Dr. Lee and Ellen had cleared Jory off the operating table to make way for the suffering young Chinese. Den Ostreicher lay now in the outer chamber, with his silver boxes screwed together and the bone disks loosely fitted back into the holes in his skull. But Dr. Lee had reconnected nothing and restarted none of his systems. If Jory survived, he would be a boy again—a boy with a large memory deficit and a badly damaged immune system, about to slough off several prosthetics and fifteen kilograms of polymer skin that his natural body had been trying to reject for more than a decade. Jory might even live through the experience, with a lot of emergency medical assistance.

He probably wouldn't get it in time, Sorbel thought coldly. She felt like an army general brought up from the rear to fight an exposed salient that was crumbling around her. Everything she did this night only made things worse.

"Now hold that!" Dr. Lee ordered.

"What?" She roused from her torpor.

"That!" He took her unsterile finger and guided it inside the end of his cut into Te Jing's throat, pressing it down through layers of slippery red membrane. At one point, she felt a jagged piece of bone and almost got sick. He pushed her finger deeper, until she was wedging the opening wide.

Jeff Te Jings body shuddered and drew a full, ragged breath.

Ellen fought to divorce her mind from her finger and what it could feel.

At that moment, Willie Lao stuck his head through the connecting tunnel. He was another of Lole's security people, some distant relation to Te Jing, she thought.

"No sign of the woman."

Dr. Lee looked up, distracted, and then bent again over the injured throat.

"Um," Sorbel temporized. "Coordinate with Lole, wall you? We're busy here."

"No sign of Lole, either."

"Well, then page him through—no, I guess you can't." Using the grid's resources to search for Lole would tip their hand, wouldn't it? Ellen tried to collect her thoughts and ignore the warmth flowing over her knuckles. "Did you check Coghlan's hotel?"

"She hasn't been back—not since earlier."

"How about the outside airlocks? Lole thought she would go that way."

"All the way up to the pressure doors," he nodded. "No record of anyone going through them, though, not for the past four hours."

Ellen was stumped. "How many of our people can you rouse?"

"This hour? Maybe ten ... fifteen."

Not enough to check twenty thousand cubic meters by visual reconnaissance, she decided. Not in a day. Not even in a week.

Slow down and figure things out one at a time, Ellen told herself. If Lole had not found Demeter by now, he would certainly have reported in—either returning to their secret room himself, or sending someone with the bad news. And if Lole had found Demeter, he would have brought her back here—or stashed her in some safe place and then sent word. Either way, he was now long overdue and could be presumed missing.

"Missing" was her minds own euphemism, Sorbel realized with cold shock. Spell it out! The grid was running Demeter Coghlan, the same as it ran Jory and the Korean. If Lole had tangled with her and come up missing, then there really were only two choices. He was dead. Or he was the grids captive and soon would be wired up to tell the machines everything he knew.

Ellen accepted neither of those choices. Not for her Lole!

But what could she do to deflect them?

Well ... if he was still a prisoner, then maybe she had time to intercede before he became one more of the walking dead.

Dr. Lee was still probing for bone pieces in Te Jing's throat. Ellen withdrew her finger, and the slit closed around his forceps.

"Hey! What're you doing?"

"Forget that for now." She wiped her hand on a fold of the body's sleeve. "We've got to move Lethe."

"But this man will—"

"Yeah, die, I know." She studied the cabling among the rogue computer's central processor, its memory modules, and its inventory of peripherals. She wanted to make the fewest disconnections to separate out a working cyber that the three of them could carry. "And so will Lole—die—unless we can get this machine out of here."

'Where are you taking it?" the doctor asked.

"Somewhere we can make a solid linkup with the grid, preferably by radio."

"Why?"

"So we can begin passing some access codes."

Dr. Lee looked down at the man on the operating table. Te Jing's throat was barely oozing now, and his chest was still. Ellen knew what the doctor was thinking: so many deaths this night, so many wrong moves.

Wa Lixin sighed. "I can't help him anyway"

From the entryway, Lao ducked his face and turned away.

'Willie!" Ellen snapped. "We need you, too."

"I'm sorry, Demeter," Roger Torraway said. The Cyborg had relaxed noticeably and now he was sitting cross-legged on the walker's deck in a less alert—and subtly more human—posture. Coghlan even fancied she could hear regret in that detached and perfectly mechanical voice.

"Where are you taking us?" she asked.

All she could see out the vehicle s side windows was stars, shining pinpricks in the black sky. It seemed as if the trip up the fountain had reversed time and overcome the dawn. The angled sunlight shining on the walker's outer hull could not blunt the gemfield displayed above them.

"I'm not taking you—" the Cyborg began, then paused. "Well, not anymore. I was under external control, putatively from the cybernetic nexus you know as 'the grid.' What its ... their... the nexus's plans are, I never was made aware. We are clearly riding the space fountain into low Mars orbit. From there, I don't know...."

"Back in the tunnels, you spoke about 'a safe place,'" Lole said. "What does that mean?"

"I don't... I remember it felt like a place that the grid controls. Where no other person .. . persona? .. . intelligence? ... could possibly interfere with its intentions toward you."

"Toward us, now," Demeter observed.

The Colonel's dark lips pulled upward in a smile, and she realized he was grateful at being included in their plight. Demeter suddenly understood how terribly lonely it must have been, wandering the open countryside for decades with only other machines and half-disemboweled humans for company. This might be the first time he had made common cause with human beings in almost fifty years—not since he had left Earth and the support of the Cyborg laboratory at Tonka, in old Oklahoma State.

"We're going to the new solar station," Lole said. "It has to be there."

"Of course!" Demeter had momentarily forgotten about the mysterious construction. "The one that the machines are building by remote control. But is there a ... place aboard it for us humans? Someplace we can breathe. I thought it would be all external surfaces and exposed structure."

"You visited there, by proxy, didn't you?" Lole asked.

"There or someplace by mistake. But I do remember a machine that was building a curved wall of heavy metal panels. It might be some kind of an environmental pod, although I got the impression of really thick plates and—oh yeah!—double walls, like for an insulating layer or a—"

"A rocket motor," Torraway supplied. "More precisely, a combustion chamber."

"Why would you think that?' Demeter wondered.

"I did have some astronaut training, you know."

"Yes," she agreed, "it could have been a motor. And a big one, judging from the curvature of that inner wall."

"That confirms something Jory said," Lole put in. "The grid was putting engines on the solar platform. It was going places, he said."

"This was the grid talking?' Demeter guessed.

"No, later, when we had him under sedation. We had already, um, severed his links to the grid by then. He was speaking true."

"The grid is going to put us aboard the platform and then send it somewhere," she summed up, feeling her way. "Somewhere safe. Now, where would that be? Back to Earth? Out to the Asteroid Belt? Europa?"

"Whatever the grid does," Lole said, "it had better move soon. Once Ellen figures out we're hostages, she's likely to take action."

"What can she do?" Demeter shrugged.

"She's got a virus planted deep in the Mars nexus, spread across a dozen or more cybers that hold tokens on the system. Once she activates it, the program will phage the grid's higher operating levels but leave the individual computers that control mechanical functions in the tunnels. Poof! No more collective intelligence."

'That's dangerous/" Torraway exploded.

"Yeah, poof! No more us," Demeter observed quietly. "If we're in transit when the system falls—"

Suddenly, Lole was trying to sound conciliatory. "Presumably, there are backups to maintain our life support and—"

Torraway wasn't buying. "How long until she pulls the plug?"

"Well, Ellen thought she could assemble the virus segments and get it rolling in less than an hour. Add to that the time she needs to get Lethe—that's our unregistered cyber—physically into position to make radio contact and launch its attack on the grid's security systems. And, for uncertainty, add the time she needs to personally decide that the grid has taken us hostage and that she needs to do something, so—"

"Four hours? Three?" the Colonel demanded.

"More like two." Lole was chewing his lower lip.

"Still not enough time," Torraway said.

"For what?" Demeter asked.

"We're already there."

Those bright stars disappeared above them, blotted out by the dark underside of the transfer station that rode at the top of the fountain. Outside the walker's side windows, Demeter saw the lower perimeter of a handling bay descend in a muted twinkle of position and docking lights and the shadows of huge magnetic grapples.

Clang! Demeter felt more than heard the dogs around the edge of the rising cargo platform release themselves while the stage slowed its ascent. The walker's deckplates surged beneath her as the vehicle lost upward momentum and went weightless in orbit. The fountainhead's controls wasted no time. Before the package represented by the walker and its inhabitants could drift out of position, the magnetic grapples caught it and slung it sideways.

Clearly, the automated equipment was used to handling inert machinery and containers, not occupied vehicles. The force of the change in vector threw Demeter forward, snapping open the buckle on her seat belt, dashing her against the sharp edges of the control panel.

On his own side of the cockpit, Lole—being taller, with a higher center of gravity—somersaulted over the panel and went upside down, heels and ass leading, against the windshield. He struck with what looked like enough force to break the glass but didn't.

Torraway folded and clattered into the backs of the two command chairs, getting himself wedged in sideways and crumpling the support pinion on one of his solar panels.

The walker immediately shunted in the opposite direction, still accelerating. Demeter fell back into her seat, cracking her elbow on Torraway's head. Lole flopped back over the control console. The idiot lights on the panel flared briefly underneath him, and the walker extended all eight of its legs.

Bang! One of the legs sheared off against a grappler head somewhere along the station's internal pathways. An instant later, the crippled walker emerged from an empty docking bay, into the starry void. The impetus from the collision made the vehicle spin slowly, its legs clutched halfway inward again, like a dead spider being washed down the drain.

A mild centrifugal force pinned Demeter against the console again, reawakening old bruises. Lole was stuffed quietly—he seemed to be unconscious— against the forward bulkhead below the windshield. Torraway had not yet fought free of his niche between the fixed sliders of the two seats.

"How fast would you say we are moving?" he asked placidly, his head and neck still caught under a chair arm.

Demeter lifted her gaze to the whirling starfield out the front window. She instantly wanted to be sick but controlled the urge.

"I don't... know, not... too fast."

"Tens of kilometers per second? Thousands?"

"Hundreds.... I can't tell."

"The Number Six solar power satellite is probably two or three thousand klicks from the transfer station. We've got a few minutes yet." The Cyborg paused. "Not long enough."

"Long enough for what?" she wanted to know.

"To get this hulk de-spun and stabilized. But then, without attitude controls, we won't be able to do it at all. Of course, there's no reason to put vector thrusters on a ground-pounder in the first place," he conceded.

"Are you tired of this spin already?" Demeter asked sarcastically.

"It's a matter of survival. The grid's observation points are fairly limited in space. It may not know that we've screwed up and are no longer oriented the way we were when those grapples gave us our last push."

"Too bad."

"Yeah, especially when we come up to the docking ring or whatever the nexus has prepared for us at the satellite. At this rate, we're likely to crash into it sideways." With an almost gentle surge, Torraway untangled his head. One solar wing fluttered weakly behind him. "I wonder if this hull will withstand the impact."

"You can breathe vacuum, can't you?" she asked.

"Yes, I can. But you two can't."