Rainbows End (44 page)

 

Yes
. UP/Ex labels with an encrypted destination. The first of the cylinders was sliding off the table, headed toward the nearest pneumo tube.

Now the Stranger was hopping from one foot to the other. “Only you can save mankind! Just knock the cylinders onto the lower tray. Don’t let Alfred win!”

That seemed to convince Miri. She rushed to the table, grabbed the package out of the pneumo tube lock, and tossed it to Robert. He caught it and the next and the next and now his arms were full. The white cylinders were as light as foam.

The Stranger’s image froze for a second. Abruptly, animation returned.

“Heh! Excellently done.” He waved vaguely at the walls. “See that, Alfred? It doesn’t pay to cross the Rabbit!”
Rabbit
? The creature turned back in their general direction; by God, it did look a little bit like a rabbit. “That was a near thing, but I won! I mean, we saved mankind.” It drew itself up, but its whole body was tilted. “Damn Alfred. He is shutting me down a piece at time. Maybe I should exit with my impression of the Wicked Witch of the West. Dying, that is.”

The creature spun around, giving out melodramatic moans, its body dissolving around it. It hesitated, and said offhandedly to Robert, “Oh, don’t let the cylinders go untreated. Just drop them onto the lower tray.” Robert didn’t move.

“I mean it!” said the Stranger, something like a serious tone creeping into its voice. It flailed about — more dramatic dying, or looking for an explanation? “If the bugs are disease vectors, you’re at ground zero! The lower tray will send them to an incinerator, all safe and tidy.”

Miri shook her head. “No. That’s an alternate path to the UP/Ex launcher.” “Look at my pdf, you fool. The map.” “I looked at
my
map, the one I cached this afternoon.” Miri’s smile was triumphant.

There was a two-second lag. Then the creature turned and looked almost straight at Miri. “I hate you, Miri Gu. You evil thing. Everything was going so well till you started meddling. I’ll get you for this.” Then it was shouting. “Meantime, I’m gonna get
you
, Alfred. If I’m out of action, so are you! I’m blowing the whistle on you. I’m — “

 

The figure stopped moving. There was a moment of silence; then Robert heard a single word, faint and faraway:”… help.”

 

And the creature vanished. Robert and Miri stared at each other. It was just the two of them, and the ranks of cabinets.

“Do you think he’s
really
gone, Miri?”
“I… don’t know.”

Miri — > Robert: But if Smart-Aleck wasn’t lying about everything, then this Alfred guy
is
still around. Aloud, her words were timid. “Maybe we should stay here and wait for the police.” “Okay.”

Miri plunked herself down on the floor. She was very quiet for a moment, both publicly and privately. Robert set the packages down and stared off into the dark, looking this way and that. Supposedly there were no mon enemy robots. What could “Alfred” do with the fruit flies now? What couk the fellow do to Miri and Robert himself?
Miri — > Robert: Things don’t sound the same.

Robert looked a question at her. Miri drew a golden arrow at right angles to the corridor they had arrived from.

Miri — > Robert: I kept track of everything I heard when I was following you. There’s something new going on, most likely in the mouse arrays. Did you do anything over that way? She quietly came back to her feet.

Robert tapped at his keypad:
Robert — > Miri: Thts whr we put most of our eqt.
Miri’s chin came up.

Miri -> Robert: The sounds are like what we heard
here
. Someone’s packaging another shipment out.
Dr. Xiang Takes Charge

Günberk and Keiko and Alfred each had their own analyst pools. Ten seconds ago those analysts had agreed: As an active threat, Rabbit was gone, both topside and in the operation’s milnet. Dissent clusters hung around the opinion, but they were related to collateral-damage prediction.

Braun — > Mitsuri, Vaz: God willing, we’ve stopped the monster.

Mitsuri — > Braun, Vaz: And we have the inspection data we came for. Now it’s time to get the hell out! She brought up a zoomed picture of the contingency tree. They were way out on a limb that led to full loss of deniability. And yet, until they knew for sure the results of their investigation, they needed the Americans kept ignorant.

Alfred presented his latest extraction schedule, the times padded just enough to cover his outshipment activities.

Mitsuri — > Braun, Vaz: Eight minutes! That much? Keiko still had things covered on the north side of the labs. And the views of the riot showed the Bollywood team still in place by the library… but that affair was descending into civil disorder, the sort of thing that brings a direct police response. Meshing Alfred back into the Bollywood people should be easy now; very soon it would be impossible.

Vaz — > Braun, Mitsuri: I’ll trim every second I can, Keiko.
Mitsuri — > Braun, Vaz: You’d better! Five minutes is the most I can guarantee.

Alfred smiled at Keiko’s impolitely constrained panic. She and Günberk would do their best. And in some ways, this chaos was helpful. Fooling Günberk and Keiko had always been Alfred’s biggest problem. His outshipment would’ve been impossible if they weren’t so distracted.

Two minutes passed. Three. His secret team had completed most of the fakery. They had updated the logs to satisfy both Alliance and future U.S. investigators. Now they were working with one small section of the
Mus musculus
arrays, his true animal model. Alfred hopped from viewpoint to viewpoint, swooping over cabinets that looked like office blocks in some bland, utilitarian city. He couldn’t take more than a few of the mice, just a few of those conceived since the last update. His team had already shut down the in-progress experiments and started destruct operations. Now they detached the chosen arrays and began prepping them for launch. Other members of the team were already sending shipping cartridges to the pneumo port atop the cabinet. He could fit one twenty-by-thirty array… six hundred mice — into each cartridge.

Mitsuri -> Braun, Vaz: Alfred! The public net is failing.
Vaz swore and glanced at the topside analysis. This wasn’t even close to Keiko’s deadline. Braun -> Mitsuri, Vaz: It’s a full system failure. Mr. Rabbit has screwed us.

The analysts were boiling with contrary opinions. Failures like this happened a couple of times a year somewhere in the world, the price that civilization paid for complexity. But here there was a more sinister suspicion, that
this
failure was collateral damage from the revocation. Maybe Rabbit’s riot magic depended on his commandeering the embedded computer systems of the public environment. Now that his certificates were revoked, there was a cascade of failures working through almost everything, just as fast as the certificates failed.

Mitsuri — > Braun, Vaz: Alfred! Clean up and get out!

The second and third cartridges would be ready in a moment. Alfred glanced at the UP/Ex status. The launcher was close to the MCog area. Most important, it was locally managed, unaffected by the crash outside. He entered a destination in Guatemala — and selected a launch vehicle that he’d emplaced some weeks before. It ought to be stealthy enough to get out of U.S. airspace.

Vaz — > Braun, Mitsuri: One minute. Can you give me that?
Mitsuri — > Braun, Vaz: I will try.

The topside analysts were hard into contingency planning and probability estimates. A thousand little changes were being made across the UCSD landscape, wherever the Indo-European operation had influence. The Bollywood presence would survive as long as any up there.

Alfred forced his attention back into the labs. The second cartridge was loading. The first cartridge was shooting down the pneumo, taking its little passengers to the launcher.

Alfred froze. The Gus were gone from the fruit-fly area. There was movement in another window, at the edge of the mice arrays. A girl and a man running toward the camera. They hadn’t been fooled by the fruit flies.

Alfred leaned forward. Okay. One minute. What could his people cook up in that time?

Lena’s wheelchair was no hiking machine. It did well enough on the asphalt, even going uphill; Xiu had to trot to keep up. But where the asphalt was carved by gullies, the chair had to walk. The going got very slow.

“Can you even see the road, Lena?” Her view-page was as dark as the natural view.

“No. I think someone has turned off the hillside. Side effect of the riot, maybe.” She moved to the middle of the road. “Sst! They’re still coming.” She waved at Xiu to come forward. “How can we stop them? One way or another, we have to find out what’s happening.”

“Robert will see you.”
“Damnation!” Lena dithered, caught in a dilemma. “Go back to the side of the road. I can stop them more safely, anyway.” “Hmph,” said Lena. But she retreated.

Xiu stood still for a moment. There were the distant sounds of the freeway. From over the hilltop there were noises that might have been chanting. But nearby was just insect sounds, the feel of air cooling in the night, the narrow roadway jumbled and rocky under her feet. She saw light sweep across the outcroppings above her.

“I can hear them, Xiu.”

 

Xiu could, too, the crunch of tires and now the faint whine of electric motors. The mystery car came around a last, unseen bend in the road, and she tensed to dive out of the way.

But on this road, cars could not speed. Its headlights slowly bore down on her. “Make way, make way.” The words were loud, and the view-page in her hand came alight with flashing warnings about the penalties for interfering with the California Highway Patrol.

Xiu started to give way, and then she thought,
But it’s the CHPI want to talk to
.

 

She waved for the car to stop. The vehicle slowed still more, then turned and tried to edge past her on the left. “Make way, make way.”

 

“No!” she shouted and hopped back in front of it. “You stop!”

 

The car moved even more slowly. “Make way, make way.” And it tried to pass her on the other side. Xiu jumped in the way again, this time flailing her backpack as though it could do some damage. The auto backed up a yard or two, and turned slyly as if preparing an end run. Xiu wondered if she really wanted to jump in front of what happened next.

With every heartbeat, pain spiked through Tommie. After a moment he realized that was
good
news. He raised his head, saw that he was stretched out on the backseat of a passenger car. That was Winston and Carlos in the facing seats.

“Where’s Robert and his little girl?”
Winston Blount shook his head. “They stayed behind.”
“We split up, Professor Parker.”
Scary memories were coming back. “Oh… yeah. Where’s my laptop? We gotta call 911.” “We called, Tommie. Everything’s okay now, this is a CHP vehicle.”
Despite his haziness, that didn’t make sense. “It sure doesn’t look like one.
“It’s got all the insignia, Tommie,” but there was dawning uncertainty in Winston’s voice.

Tommie slid his legs from the seat and pushed himself into a half-sitting position. The pain squeezed tight on his chest, clawed out along his arms. He almost blacked out again, and would have fallen forward if not for Carlos.
“Hold… hold me up!” Tommie looked forward. The car’s headlights were on. The road was steep and narrow, with scattered remnants of asphalt surfacing, the sort of thing you might see in the East County, or in short stretches along the coast, a disconnected remnant of lost roadway. They slowed, negotiating deeply shadowed gullies. Bushes swept close around them. And now ahead he saw someone standing in the middle of the road. The car slowed to a crawl just five yards short of — it was a young woman.

“Make way, make way.” Their car said over and over, trying to get by on one side and then the other. The woman hopped from side to side, blocking them. She was shouting, and swinging a good-sized backpack at them.

Their car backed up a few feet, and Tommie heard the faint squeal of a capacitor preparing for something drastic. The wheels turned a few degrees — and the woman jumped in front of them again. Her face was bright in the headlights. It was a pretty Asian face… if you added thirty years to it, you got the face from some very distasteful turn-of-the-century papers in
Secure Computing
. She was the last person he’d ever expect to play “block the tanks at Tiananmen Square.”

The headlights went out. The car jolted forward. Then the brakes engaged and they slid halfway into the ditch. There was a muffled explosion that might have been that capacitor slagging itself. The doors on both sides of the vehicle popped open and Tommie slid partway into the cool night air.

“You okay, Professor Parker?” That was Carlos’s voice, coming from close behind his head.

“Not dead yet.” He heard footsteps on the roadway. A light flared in a small hand, and the woman said loudly, “It’s Winston Blount and Carlos Rivera — ” and then more conversationally, ” — and Thomas Parker. Y-You probably don’t know me, Dr. Parker, but I have admired your work.”

Tommie didn’t know what to say to that.
“Let us pass,” said Winston. “This is an emergency.”

He was interrupted by the sound of wheels — but not from another car. A voice spoke from the darkness: “Where’s Miri? Where’s Robert?”

 

Carlos said, “They’re still inside. They’re trying to stop the — We’re afraid that someone is taking over the labs.”

 

Motors whined. It was a wheelchair, carrying someone all hunched over. But the voice was strong and irritated. “Damn it. Lab security would prevent that.”

“Maybe not.” Winnie sounded like he was chewing on broken glass. “We think that someone has… subverted security. We called 911. That’s what you’re interfering with.” He waved at their car. It was halfway into the ditch, unmoving.

Tommie looked at the darkened passenger car. “No,” he said. “That’s a fake. Please. You call 911.” The wheelchair rolled nearer. “I’m trying to! But we’re in some kind of a deadzone. We should go down the hill, find something we can latch on to.”