Cyber Rogues (46 page)

Clearly they couldn’t go on into the freight-distribution area, which was swarming with drones and machines. They tried to work their way past it beneath a section of floor, but found themselves being forced steadily farther around to the south instead of northward as they had intended. Eventually they had come out into the core again at the transformer beneath which they were now still lying, looking directly out into what appeared to be
Spartacus
’s
main through line to Pittsburgh.

Then Chris had had his great idea. The stream of scrap for recycling almost certainly flowed straight through the core of Detroit, right at the heart of the enemy stronghold. There, staring them in the face, was a free ride to within a few dozen feet of where the fusion plant was located.

They had been arguing about it ever since.

In the end Ron gave in. They wriggled out to the edge of the transformer pit and waited for a fairly intact cab to appear upstream in the slowly lurching line. Then as it came abreast of them they threw themselves across the four-foot gap that separated it from the floor of the transformer pit, and they landed in a tangled heap down between where the seats had once been.

“Keep down and stay away from the windows,” Chris warned. “There’s a bright part coming up just ahead.”

“Hey, this thing’s full of bits of junk,” Ron said. “I feel like I’m sitting inside a scrap heap.”

“Complain to the management about it when we get off.”

Ron’s beard shook from side to side behind his visor. “What a hell of a way to run a railroad,” he muttered.

Dyer reached out ahead of him and grasped the jagged edge where the lip of the Spin Decoupler ring had been blown away by the Gremlin. He hauled himself closer until he could hook an arm around part of the ruptured outer skin, freed his foot from the tear in which he had wedged it, and brought his leg forward to curl it around the edge of the gaping hole in the surface that formed the immense roof sweeping away on every side above him. Even though his weight was almost negligible this close to the axis, he still retained the distinct slothlike feeling that he had developed in the course of the long climb along the Spindle. At last he rolled himself up and into the hole to lie in a normal position on the inner surface, then sat up and fastened the loop tied in the safety line around a length of projecting spar.

“Okay,” he said. “I’m in. You can unhitch and move whenever you like.”

He had left Laura hanging below the roof thirty feet back, secured to—of all things—the base of one of the tripod legs that supported some kind of instrument that
Spartacus
had erected. Dyer hadn’t seen the thing until he was nearly next to it, by which time he realized that whatever it was had been built to look up off the surface and not down at it, and thus couldn’t see him. It had made as good a belay as any, and besides, there had been nothing else handy in the vicinity.

“Okay, I’m unhitched,” Laura’s voice said in his helmet. “I’m not sorry to get away from this thing either. It gives me the creeps.” Dyer smiled faintly and settled back to take in the slack of the line as she climbed across toward him.

The haul up from 17D had been tedious and nerve-racking, but it had gone without incident. Using the scars of battle damage left upon Janus’s skin or, where no readymade holes presented themselves, bolts that Dyer jammed into holes that he made with a spring-loaded punch taken from the bug’s tool kit, they had worked their way up over the monstrous sweeping curve of the Hub and along the roof of the Spindle to the Decoupler. They had moved singly, with one of them anchored to the structure while the other climbed at the far end of the line.

At one point, when they were nearly at the Spindle, they had watched a lot of Spartacus-controlled traffic moving outward and landing on the Rim. Not long afterward the shield had suddenly broken up and expanded away into space in a spectacular shower of metal and dust as witnessed from their unique vantage point. Apart from that, all had been fairly quiet. Numerous gadgets still hung in the blackness below them between the Hub and Detroit, and others had scuttled back and forth in one direction or another, but none of them had interfered with the two tiny specks clawing their way upward through the ink-black shadow that engulfed the south side of the Hub.

“I’m at the bolt with the wire loop hanging from it,” Laura’s voice said. “Where do I go now?”

“Are you on the loop?”

“Yes. I’ve got a foot wedged between the two long bolts.”

“Let your foot slip out. Swing on the loop like a pendulum and stretch out right ahead of you as you come up the other side. There’s a groove you can jam your fist in. Then let go of the loop and try and wriggle a toe through it. Once you’re there you’ll only have about ten more feet to go.”

A few minutes later she was beside him looking up into the chasm that the Gremlin had made into the Decoupler. Strictly speaking, they were looking into only half of the chasm since the irregular hole terminated abruptly against the smooth wall formed by the south half of the Decoupler system; the other part of the hole was somewhere else as a result of remaining still while they were carried around along with the northern part of Janus. Once every revolution the two parts of the hole were aligned as they had been at the instant the Gremlin struck.

Above them the structure of the outer ring appeared badly damaged but beyond that they could see the enormous windings and magnetic pole pieces that encased the inner ring. And all up one side of the hole, the unbroken wall of the southern half of the Decoupler slid endlessly by. Laura became conscious for the first time that the whole structure around them was pulsating incessantly with throbs from the very heart of the Spindle, as if some unimaginable force were straining to break free from the clutches of titanic counter-forces fighting to hold them in check.

“What you’re looking up into is part of the Magnetic Balancing System,” Dyer said. “The two halves of Janus are coupled by a system of complex magnetic fields across the gap between the two disks of the Decoupler. The field strengths are altered dynamically to compensate for any imbalance forces that arise from masses being redistributed around Janus, for example when things move around the Rim or inside Pittsburgh or Detroit.”

“You mean something like an automobile wheel being out of balance?” Laura asked.

“Right. An unbalanced wheel vibrates. What’s supposed to happen here is that sensors monitor the vibration forces from instant to instant and modulate the magnetic coupling fields to just cancel them out. So you end up with a nice smooth rotation.”

“It doesn’t feel very smooth to me,” Laura commented.

“It’s not. Something’s screwed it. That Gremlin Kim put into it can’t have done much good. In fact I’m surprised the vibration’s not worse. I’ve been watching the inner ring yokes up there while I was waiting. The alignment’s all gone to hell. By my reckoning it shouldn’t be holding together at all. It just doesn’t seem possible.”

“You mean this whole thing could come apart any second?”

“I reckon it already should have.”

Laura digested the information while she checked over the items of equipment that she had brought with her to make sure they were all still there. The vibration in the structure around them suddenly started growing more intense and proceeded to increase rapidly. Dyer caught Laura’s arm to attract her attention and pointed at the moving face of the south disk of the Decoupler.

“Watch now,” he said.

As the shaking rose to a crescendo, a jagged edge appeared suddenly from behind where part of the north disk had been blown away. The other part of the hole had completed another revolution, Laura realized, and was coming into line once more with the part they were sitting in. The gap widened at a rate of one and a half feet per second until the gash matched through both disks and for a few seconds uncovered a direct opening through into the southern part of the Spindle. The part of the south disk that was now visible, together with much of the reinforcing structures and windings exposed behind it, had been hideously deformed by the Gremlin and in places whole structures were buckled and writhing as they scraped against damaged members protruding across from the north side of the gap. That accounted for the buildup in vibration at this point in the rotation cycle. And then the trailing edge of the south-disk hole moved into view and the way through into south Spindle started to close up again. In six seconds it had gone. The gash in the north disk was once again blocked by a smooth sliding wall and gradually the vibration returned to its former level.

“That’s where we have to get through next time it comes around,” Dyer said. “I’ve been timing it. The gap lasts for about thirteen seconds, but it’s only wide enough to clear for five, maybe six. At this gravity, a good strong jump off this girder should take you straight up and through without any problem. We’ll have to go together in tandem. I’ll go first. As soon as I jump wait one second, no more, then go. Make sure you’re not trailing any gear that could get fouled up on the sides. Okay?”

Laura felt cold fingers running loose up and down her spine. She swallowed hard and fought down the part of her that wanted to forget the whole thing and settle for a peaceful end to it all out here amid the tranquility of the stars. Dyer had already moved up onto the girder and was standing waiting with his back to her and his arms braced across two struts to give him a firm push-off. As she stepped carefully up to stand behind him, she had to make an effort to thrust out of her mind the images that were trying to form of a writhing body being mashed into pulp between the relentless jagged scissor edges gouged in the Decoupler disks. Dyer sensed the meaning of her silence and started talking again to stop her apprehensions from taking root.

“The computers that control the magnetic system were supposed to be connected through to Phase III of Icarus, which never got built. But the conduit to carry the connections was installed somewhere just inside the south Decoupler disk. It forms an offshoot from the main tube we’re trying to get into and I’m pretty sure it ends somewhere out near the edge of the disk. With luck we could find we’re not far away from it when we get through. That all depends where it was when Kim fired. At any rate, the branch comes out into the dead-end area here near the edge of the disk and I’m hoping
Spartacus
won’t have been too active around there.”

The vibration began building up again.

“Here it comes,” Dyer said. “Remember that what you land in will be moving relative to what you’re standing on now. As you jump, twist so your feet point to the left. You’ll be landing at about ten miles an hour.” The edge came into sight and the breach began opening again. “Ready?”

“Okay . . . Boy, is Zeegram gonna hear about this!”

Dyer waited until the breach was a couple of feet short of its maximum width and then hurled himself forward and upward with simultaneous thrusts of his arms and legs. The jaws sailed past on either side of him, at the same time turning as his body pivoted slowly to bring his feet around. Shadow enveloped him and his feet struck hard onto something solid. He shot out an arm blindly. It hooked into something and in an instant he had checked his flight and spun himself around into a firm position around a bar. The breach was at maximum and already starting to close, but Laura wasn’t through. He could see her sailing toward it on the opposite side. Too slow! She was moving too slow! The wheeling of her body and the trailing leg told him in the same split second that her foot must have slipped as she launched off. He stretched out his arms to grasp the line that still connected them together and heaved with every ounce of strength he could muster. Laura may have weighed only a few pounds, but that didn’t change her body’s inertia.

She flew through in a flurry of arms and legs and was sent spinning as one of the closing jaws caught her boot. A second later she crashed to a halt in Dyer’s waiting outstretched arm. A gasp of suddenly expelled breath came through in his helmet, followed by sounds of heaving and panting.

“Are you hurt?” he asked anxiously.

“
Jeez . . .
gimme a second . . . no, I think I’m okay. Maybe I don’t wanna be a scientist after all.”

“You’ll never make the Bolshoi with that act.”

“Maybe the circus could use a new clown.”

“Sure nothing hurts?”

“No, I’m okay. Just a bit winded.”

“Let’s go then.”

They had shed the rotational motion of North Janus and were in free-fall. After some searching around, Dyer recognized a gallery that led to the area where the Decoupler computers were situated and near which the branch conduit from the main shaft terminated.

They were almost at the door that led into the computer room when Dyer suddenly shoved Laura hard against the wall behind a projecting corner and cannoned in behind her.

“What?” she whispered.

“Take a look. Careful.”

Laura inched her head forward to peer around and along the corridor, then jerked it back quickly. A sphere drone, a flame thrower and an armored cannon were hovering in a tight cluster immediately outside the computer-room door, apparently preoccupied with something inside it. Somehow they seemed to be watching something rather than threatening.

“They weren’t looking this way,” Dyer said. “They didn’t see us.”

“So what now?” Laura fingered the M25 that she was holding. “I’m game if you are.”

“No,” Dyer said. “We’ve only got feet to go now. Even if we knocked out all three of them the cavalry would be here in no time. The conduit comes out in a sealed-off shaft set back from this side of the corridor.” He pointed to a hatch in the wall back along from the corner where they were standing. “We can probably get into the shaft around the back way and through there. Take a wrench and help me get those nuts off.”

He was right. Minutes later they were inside the shaft. The conduit cover had not been disturbed and soon they were squeezing along inside the narrow tube that pointed toward the axis. Almost a hundred feet farther on, the tube came out into a wider shaft that ran north-south. It was quite empty and when Dyer extinguished his lamp no telltale patches of light that would have told of the shaft having been opened were visible in either direction.