The Credulity Nexus (34 page)

“
Nothing that happened to me from the
moment I took the job with Greet-Greet has been a coincidence. They
must have been feeding Lanham's guys intel all along, to make sure
they sent someone into the gene lab in Berlin just in time to send
me running for cover. My guess is that Rivers should have come
after me once I'd taken delivery, not before – unless Cordell was
hoping he'd get rid of Peth, too.

“
So I run, and the first place I go for
help I find my old friend Ockenden has mysteriously been killed.
But that's just the start of it. Maria and her boyfriend, Blake and
Brie... Cordell didn't even have to do his own dirty work – he knew
Lanham would be completely ruthless in hunting me down and making
sure I had nowhere to go.” He laughed bitterly. “The fact that I
lost track of the package must have scared the old bastard
shitless. But he made the right call in having Maria followed.
Wrong call in using that woman Kirsty, but he had Clermont and the
bots to back up that play, so it all worked out for
him.”

Freymann saw
the logic, but it still didn't explain things. “Yes, but what made
you think there was no virus?”

“
Why should there be? All Cordell wanted
was to push the uploads into making a stupid, desperate move. All
he needed for that was the possibility that he could control the
credulity nexus. He could have conceived of the whole plan years
ago and set up GeneWerken as a complete sham. I wouldn't put it
past him.”

“
Yes, but–”

“
I found a man dying at GeneWerken when I
went in. Rivers had almost finished him, but he had the box of
phials on him and he had the strength still to hand them to
me.”

“
Damn!” Freymann said, angry at herself for
not having noticed it earlier. “Why did he give them to you? All he
should have known was that the place was under attack. He must have
been expecting you. You, personally. He must have seen pictures,
been briefed. They all must have. Yet...” Yet it still didn't
explain why Rik thought there was no virus.

“
As he handed over the box, he said, 'For
we must needs die.'”

“
Is it a quote? Shakespeare?”

“
Military?” asked Burleigh.

“
Biblical,” Rik said. “It's from the second
book of Samuel. The full quote is 'For we must needs die, and are
as water spilt on the ground.' Which doesn't really say much. I
looked it up at the time and just dismissed it as the kind of thing
a religious nut might say when he's about to die.

“
But once that bot broke the phials, it
suddenly came back to me, and I wondered why, out of all the things
in the Bible that might have come into that guy's mind that day,
that very moment, he picked 2 Samuel 14:14. Death? OK, that makes
sense. But water spilled on the ground?”

“
And that's it?” Freymann wasn't happy.
“You talked us into breaking the quarantine based on
that?”

Annoyingly,
Rik just shrugged. “It seemed like a lot to me.”

Again, the
thought went through her head that maybe they had all been infected
and were now gullible fools, believing any half-assed conspiracy
anyone cared to dream up. She pushed the thought away. If it was
true, there was nothing she could do about it, and she'd better
start getting used to it. But if they weren't infected – meaning
Rik was right – then she'd just have to add 'brilliant' and
'intuitive' to his list of qualities. It wasn't a side of him she'd
seen much sign of in their brief acquaintance, but then, she hadn't
exactly been a star performer herself of late. Letting Cordell's
goons kidnap her in her own home was probably the low point of her
whole career.

“
What about this Lanham guy?” Burleigh
asked.

Rik shook his
head. “I called him five minutes ago and told him the story.”

“
And?”

“
It takes nearly seventeen minutes round
trip for a signal to Omega Point. He won't even get it for another
few minutes.”

Burleigh sat
back in his seat, looking worried. “This is not looking good.”

Freymann
didn't like the hint of doom in his voice. “What does it matter? If
we can't talk Lanham out of it, we can still take your ship up
there and stop them, right? Shoot them down if we have to?”

“
Shoot them?” Burleigh was clearly amazed
at the idea. “You can do that kind of thing down here, young lady,
but up there you cannot. Do you suppose that UNPF ships carry
missiles and lasers? I assure you, they do not! No ship in space
carries weapons. There are treaties going back a hundred years that
expressly forbid it. The quickest way I could think of to start
World War Three would be to arm a spaceship.”

There was a
silence. Freymann's first thought was, “So how do we stop them?”
Her second was, “So how can Lanham's ship do us any harm?” This one
she said out loud.

“
That's a damn good point, girl,” Burleigh
said. “Anything you're not telling us, Rik?”

Rik shook his
head. He seemed lost in thought. “Can we shoot it down from the
ground?” he asked.

“
Yeah, sure,” said Burleigh. “I'll call up
Missile Command and have them fire off a salvo.” It was obvious
from his tone that this was sarcasm.

Which seemed
fair enough, after a moment's thought. The Moon wasn't like a
nation state on Earth. It was a multinational settlement in neutral
territory, licensed to scientific and commercial interests under
that long string of treaties Burleigh had mentioned. That's why the
UNPF policed the Moon, and space in general: because it was
nobody's sovereign territory – or everybody's, depending on how you
looked at it. With no weapons in space and no national borders to
protect, there was no need to have military capabilities on the
Moon – beyond what was needed to maintain order.

“
OK,” Freymann said, “I ask again, what can
Lanham do without weapons?”

Rik shrugged
again. “He's got something planned. Whatever it is, he has to take
out Heinlein and leave no-one left alive. Maybe he'll just toss one
of those suitcase nukes out the airlock.”

“
It doesn't work like that,” Burleigh said,
obviously taking the suggestion seriously. “It would just stay in
orbit. They'd need an engine to slow it down, something to steer
it, targeting... They'd need a missile.”

A horrible thought came to Freymann. “Or
they could
be
the missile,”
she said. “If they used their ship to dive into the city... You
wouldn't need a nuke to destroy something as small and fragile as
Heinlein. One high-velocity impact from a hundred-tonne spaceship
ought to do it.”

Burleigh's
eyes went wide. “Shit! Would they do that, Rik?”

To Freymann's
relief, Rik shook his head. “I don't think so. It's Cordell's
people who are the fanatics, not Lanham's. Don't forget, these are
uploads. They all want to live forever. I can't see them giving
their lives for the cause.” He pondered for a moment, but seemed
happy with his reasoning. “No. They have some other way.”

“
OK,” Freymann said. She'd driven meetings
like this before, pushing people to think around the problem. She
knew that ideas came, in the end, no matter how unlikely it seemed.
“If they can't drop a bomb and they can't fire a missile and they
can't dive on us from space, why take the ship up there to hover
over us? What's that all about?”

“
Pull over! Stop the pod!” Burleigh
shouted. They slewed off the road and onto the hard shoulder.
“They're up there watching,” he said. “The bomb is already down
here, waiting for their signal.”

Rik looked
convinced. “But where the hell could it be? We don't have time to
search the whole town.”

“
Rivers!” Freymann saw it at once. “It's
got to be her. How else could they keep a bomb big enough close to
you?”

“
Rivers?”

“
Sure. I know they talk about suitcase
bombs, but they can fit them into anything these days. I've seen
specs for just the kind of thing they need. Nanotech makes it easy.
They suspend plutonium particles in a matrix of boron and gold.
When they need the bomb it flows like a liquid to a central point
and self-assembles. It takes a few minutes to go from nothing to a
working A-bomb.”

“
Veb!” Rik, apparently, already had his
friend on the phone. He touched Freymann's and Burleigh's hands so
they could listen in.

“
Rik! I was just about to call you. We're
at the nanohacker's place now, and something weird has come
up.”

“
Tell him to stitch her up right now and
don't go near the blasted woman. It's a bomb, Veb. She's a walking
bomb. Is she in a Faraday cage, like you said?”

Freymann heard
Veb at the other end, shouting instructions. Then he came back.
“Yeah, they're in a cage. Hey!” He went away for a moment and there
was shouting in the background. “Sorry Rik, I had to make the guy
shut up. He was trying to throw us both out. Jerk pulled a gun.
What's going on?”

“
We're on our way, Veb. Keep the guy with
you. We're going to need him, but don't let Rivers leave that cage
for one second, or we're all dead. You got that?”

“
Sure.” The upload didn't sound too
certain, but it was good enough for Rik.

“
Lieutenant, can you rustle up some
bot-techs? The kind that could disassemble this thing?”

Burleigh
didn't answer but got onto his own phone and started organising
people. The pod started up again, did a U-turn and headed for the
address that came with Veb's call.

“
Will they be able to dismantle it?” he
asked Freymann.

The agent shrugged.
“
I have no idea. I'm just a field agent. You see these
things in briefings, but they don't tell you which wire to cut.
It's a specialist job.” And the nearest specialists would be four
hundred thousand kilometres away, on Earth. “We just need to stop
the trigger signal from getting through. If Burleigh's guys can
disable the receiver, we should be OK. She won't be radioactive.
Not much, anyway.”

Burleigh got
off the phone, looking unhappy. “The Mayor just declared a general
quarantine.”

“
What?” Rik sounded like he was about to
start chewing the furniture. “We need an evacuation, not a
lock-down! Did you tell her about the bomb?”

Burleigh
pursed his lips. “She thinks we should deal with one major crisis
at a time.”

Rik was
silent, no doubt as dumbstruck as Freymann by the sheer idiocy of
the notion.

“
Oh, and she's ordered me to implement
roadblocks all over the city, to prevent anyone from panicking and
trying to leave.”

“
She doesn't have any jurisdiction over
UNPF forces,” Freymann said.

“
Yeah. When I explained that, she suggested
my commanding officer might be more co-operative.” He looked
briefly at the pod's plastic ceiling. “I'm guessing that would be
Major Herez's call now.”

Burleigh went
into a scowling huddle with his cogplus, and Freymann watched him
in silence.

Rik slammed
the side of his clenched fist against the pod door. The flimsy
plastic shell shook ominously. The first time he had ever seen any
kind of traffic jam in Heinlein, and it had to be today. Of course,
the reason was obvious.

Ever since the
Mayor had declared the quarantine, every man, woman, child and
cockroach in the city had taken to the streets, trying to find a
way off-world. The UNPF roadblocks just added to the chaos. If
somebody in authority didn't do something sensible soon, the good
people of Heinlein would start tearing their way through the tunnel
walls.

The big police
lieutenant sitting beside him was in a sulk. His commanding officer
had suspended him and ordered him back to barracks. Freymann, too,
had fallen silent as the stop-start journey finally ground to a
complete halt.

Rik checked
out the streets around him. If he strained his neck, he could just
make out the entrance to The Harsh Mistress, a block ahead of them.
That meant Veb's nanotech guy was just one tunnel across, one down,
and a couple more blocks farther along.

“
I'm walking,” he told whoever cared to
know, and pushed back the sliding door. Neither of his companions
argued.

The street was
busy. A solid queue of electric carts, bulging with people and
luggage, clogged the transitway. People hurried past them on the
sidewalk, carrying whatever they had thought to snatch up. Most
were going the way the police car had just come, back towards the
spaceport. Rik, with Burleigh and Freymann in his wake, pushed
through them like a bulldozer. Even the uploads made way for him
without demur.

It was because
of the crowds that Rik didn't see the little runt of a boy until he
was almost past him. It was the same kid he'd seen staring into the
bar just before the fight. The kid was standing on a packing crate
outside The Harsh Mistress, looking at the faces of the passing
crowd, searching for someone. Rik changed course.

“
Hey.”

The boy almost
fell off his box, finding Rik yelling in his ear. For a moment, the
kid just stared into Rik's eyes.

“
So?” Rik asked. It was pretty obvious that
the boy was looking for him, and that he had something to
say.

“
It's my father.”

Hearing the
boy's Scottish accent, a dozen suppositions sprang to Rik's mind,
but he held his tongue.