James P. Hogan (44 page)

It was what Paula had been expecting him to say, but as usual Earnshaw had had to check through all the alternatives and possible objections first. She nodded. “Write out what you want to send, and I’ll take it back up with me.”

“Exactly what do you do with it then?”

“The chip is programmed, but the transmission text has to be loaded into it. I do that on an offline system – there are several that I can get access to up there.”

“Inside Zamork?”

“I’m working in a place at Turgenev in the day. Olga fixed it. That was how I got out of the kitchens.”

“What kind of work?”

“Eco-modeling.”

“Go on.”

“Then Olga takes the chip back and passes it to an associate she’s got, who substitutes it for a chip in the outgoing coding processors.”

“How do you get the replies back?”

“They’re encoded in statistical updates beamed up into the library, Olga transcribes them and brings me the copy.”

“So Russians have access to the plaintext going both ways.”

“How else could it be? Two separate systems are involved: here down to Siberia, and from there into our commnet. There has to be a conversion from one to the other.”

McCain nodded reluctantly. “Okay. Let’s sit down again. I won’t be a second.” He went over to the table where Scanlon was working, and returned with a notepad and a pencil. They sat down on the boxes again, and he handed her the pencil and pad. “What was Tycoon’s last initializer?” he asked.

“Hot,” she told him.

“My completion is ‘Gospel,’” McCain said. Only he had known that. Paula’s completion code for the same word would have been “Rod.”

“Initializer?” Paula asked.

McCain thought for a second. “Trans.” Paula might have chosen the same word too, for it was also on her list. In her case only, a valid reply from Foleda would carry the completion “Locate”; for a valid reply to McCain, however, she had no idea what the completion should be.

Paula wrote:
SEXTON
/
GOSPEL
TO
TYCOON
/
TRANS
. She waited. McCain whistled tunelessly through his teeth for a few seconds and then dictated a straightforward, innocuous statement to the effect that he was being detained on
Tereshkova
, and that he was in good shape and being treated fairly, apart from denial of communications rights.

Paula looked up questioningly. “That’s it?”

“That’s it.”

“You’re not going to say anything else?”

“What else do you want me to say?”

“Well, you could answer some of the questions that Tycoon asked in his message. We could give the names of some of the VIPs upstairs that he sounded interested in. Or mention that the place is taking in new batches of civilians with lots of children. Or that tons of soil from Earth are arriving here. Wouldn’t that be considered useful intelligence material?”

McCain shook his head. “Not until I’ve a better idea who I’m talking to.”

Paula sighed with exasperation. In her own mind she had no doubt that the link was genuine. “You’re talking to Tycoon,” she said. “Believe me, I
know.
”

“Let’s wait and see, shall we?”

“God, why are all you intelligence people so suspicious of everything?”

“We’re not. But the ones who aren’t don’t last too long. So your impressions end up being formed only by the rest. Scientists call it statistical bias. We call it survival. But isn’t that what eco-modeling is supposed to be all about?”

On her next day at Turgenev, Paula composed the message as Earnshaw had directed. She had thought of sending a separate communication along with it under her own code to supply the additional information she had suggested,, but on further reflection decided against it. It would be tantamount to a direct violation of orders, for one thing – Earnshaw was still the senior member of the mission – and for another, it would only be a matter of days at the most before Tycoon replied. Then, with Earnshaw finally reassured, all would proceed much more smoothly.

Sure enough, a couple of days later Olga brought Paula a transcript of a message from Tycoon to “Sexton/Vaal,” This time Paula was spared another ordeal in the elevator shaft, for Earnshaw came up to meet her in the machinery gallery at the bottom of the shaft beneath Eban Istamel’s hut. Earnshaw confirmed that “Vaal” was the correct completion for “Trans” from his own personal list. Therefore there could no longer be any doubt that the channel did connect all the way through to Foleda in Washington. To Paula’s chagrin, however, he still declined to supply the information she had suggested. But he did give her a reply in which he hinted that he was in a position to enjoy virtually unlimited freedom of movement around the colony’s outer ring.

The tone of the response that came back from Foleda gave the impression that he was in trouble and having credibility problems back home. Uncharacteristically throwing caution to the winds, he specified the precise locations around
Tereshkova
where weapons installations were suspected to exist, described their nature, and requested Sexton to check the sites and report as quickly as possible. The message ended,
REPEAT
,
OBJECTIVE
SUBORDINATES
OTHER
CONSIDERATIONS
.
POSSIBILITY
OF
COMPROMISE
ACCEPTABLE
.
EXPEDITE
BY
ALL
AVAILABLE
MEANS
.

Which meant, “Risk your ass if you have to. We need this.”

The two principal factors that made
Valentina Tereshkova
potentially so formidable were its distance from Earth and its sheer size. Whether driven by high-power pulsed reactors located in the hub or rim, or in the form of ejectable bomb-type devices, its weaponry would be based on transforming nuclear energy into beams of concentrated firepower traveling at the speed of light and impacting on their targets at a rate equivalent to tens or even hundreds of tones of high explosive per second. Since nuclear processes produce energy at an intensity millions of times greater than anything attainable from conventional sources, which involve only the outer electron shells of atoms, the resulting hardware would be extremely compact, and thus easily hidden in lots of unlikely places.

This had caused a lot of headaches among the Western analysts whose job was to come up with credible ways to attack the platform, should the need ever arise – the military had contingency plans filed away for just about every eventuality conceivable. True enough, a single nuclear warhead would have sufficed to destroy it totally, but missiles of any kind were ruled out. With the target at almost-lunar distance – ten times that to geosynchronous orbit – surprise would be out of the question: in the long climb from near-Earth space an attacking wave of missiles would have no hope of any surviving. Yes, the West did have beam weapons of its own deployed in near-Earth orbits. But this was where
Tereshkova’s
size made the telling difference. For the West’s weapons were comparatively small, special-purpose types designed to attack pinpointable targets such as missiles and satellites at shorter ranges. Hence they couldn’t hope to knock out the hidden weapons on something like
Tereshkova
in a surprise attack. Counterfire from
Tereshkova
, on the other hand, would be instantly devastating to clearly defined targets sitting in space. The answer, of course, would have been to build something comparable in size at the proper time, but it was a little late to catch that boat now, and the political arguing was still going on.

Also significant was
Tereshkova’s
capacity to accommodate a variety of weapons. The essence of directed-beam strategy was to be able to deliver a wide range of wavelengths from the electromagnetic, and particle energy spectra, generated by a series of devices differently “tuned” to exploit the weaknesses of a given target type. Typically, hardening or protecting a target against one part of the spectrum would render it more vulnerable in another part. For example, crudely focused, intense bursts of microwave energy would act by becoming trapped and concentrated, waveguide-fashion, in the structural cavities of the target, causing intense internal currents to circulate as if the target had been struck by lightning. Effective shielding against such a microwave attack could be achieved by cladding the target with an insulated metal skin. But this would make it more susceptible to pulsed diffuse X-rays, which when deposited upon an insulated metal layer induce strong electromagnetic emissions inside the shield, fatal to electronic equipment. Heavy ions carried kinetic energy deep into solids faster than it could dissipate, causing materials to explode. Muons made lightning with two hundred times the mass of electron beams. Neutrons induced premature fission in warheads, degrading them to uselessness.

Symphony for full orchestra.

One of the suspected weapons that Foleda had communicated details of to McCain was a tunable, high-power, free-electron laser. That meant that the laser beam drew its energy from accelerated electrons that could be made to vibrate at any of a range of frequencies by a variable magnetic field. This contrasts with methods employing an excited solid, liquid, or gas medium, where the frequency is fixed and depends on the medium used. The system in question, it was claimed, operated across the optical spectrum from infrared to ultraviolet, and was aimed by the optical-mirror system located around the hub. According to the information received, it existed beneath the confused pile of buildings, tanks, conveyor ramps, and elevator machinery known as Agricultural Station 3, at the base of the minor spoke between Turgenev and Novyi Kazan.

McCain was far from certain what a tunable, high-power, free-electron laser installation ought to look like. In fact, he hadn’t a clue. But as long as he was able to describe accurately what lay in there, the experts could worry about interpreting what it meant. Moreover, he had reasoned, if it existed it would be securely contained and guarded. So even if it proved impossible to actually get inside, the existence of obstacles too formidable to penetrate would say enough about the kind of place it was. And if the obstacles turned out to be more than would allow them to simply test and withdraw?… Well, as Foleda had so thoughtfully reminded him, that was part of the job.

He felt the car slowing down in the darkness. Then it clattered over a series of switches before stopping for a few seconds, lurched a short distance forward, and then stopped again. From a point beside him, Scanlon’s flashlight beam came on to reveal another stationary car filling the tunnel ahead, and a narrow maintenance walkway on one side, behind a handrail. It meant they were joining the line of waiting cars that often formed at the approach to the loading point below Agricultural Station 3. They had come out of the regular transit tube, and the roof here was somewhat higher.

“This will do us as good as anywhere,” Scanlon’s voice said from the darkness.

“Sure, Let’s go.”

McCain raised himself out of the hollow in the car’s load of kidney beans that he had been lying in, and shone his own light while Scanlon hauled himself over the side and onto the walkway. Then McCain joined him. Even when they were heading for a destination farther on around the ring, they had learned from experience to get off the transit system here, work around the loading area on foot, and catch another car on the far side. On an earlier expedition that McCain had made with Mungabo, the load of corn they were riding had been switched up a ramp and emptied into a silo by physically inverting the car, almost suffocating both of them. McCain was beginning to feel like an unnatural denizen of some strange subterranean world of pipes, girders, ducting, and metal, whose proper inhabitants were not creatures of flesh and blood at all, but the ubiquitous, tireless machines.

An opening off the walkway brought them into an upward-sloping passage that bent through an angle to join a large compartment containing motors and winches, with cables disappearing up into the space overhead. The flashlights picked out more passages going off in other directions and walls meeting in strange combinations of angles. As with the oddly-flung-together jumbles of constructions surrounding the spoke-bases on the surface, there didn’t seem to be a straight edge or surface anywhere that ran direct from one side of the torus to the other – like a bulkhead in a ship. Even Rashazzi, for all his sightings and measurements, had confessed to getting confused in the process of passing through the spoke zones, and frequently found himself coming out of them in a direction he hadn’t expected. The others who had reconnoitered long-distance around
Tereshkova
had all reported similar difficulties.

They stopped here to exchange the coveralls that they had taken to wearing when riding the tubes for standard light-blue smocks and white caps, as worn by the agricultural technicians, which Koh had stolen on a work assignment. The coveralls hadn’t been really necessary this time, as it turned out, but on other occasions they had dropped into cars full of the earth still coming down the spokes from transporters unloading at the hub and come out looking like mud-wrestlers. The smocks carried their two general-clearance badges, enabling them to move around. Having only two badges exacerbated the problem of limited time, and Istamel was working on a scheme for acquiring more.

McCain unfolded a sheaf of papers containing extracts from Foleda’s instructions and sketches from previous reconnaissances. “Section of bulkhead to the east. Inspection ladder leading to catwalk below cable bank,” he read.

Scanlon aimed his light upward and swung it from side to side. “Well, there’s what some people might call a bulkhead, and that’s a ladder. It’s close to east, I’d say, but how can a man be sure?”

“That has to be the way. Are you all set?”

“To be sure, hasn’t it been me that’s been waiting for the last five minutes? So let’s be off.”

McCain’s group had established that one of the colony’s waste-reduction and water-recycling plants was situated in that direction, as indeed was shown in the public information released by the Soviets. Beyond it, the official plans showed a long space, radial to the main axis – thus pointing, interestingly, at the mirror system surrounding the hub – which was described vaguely as “Materials Storage.” That, according to the information that Foleda had assembled, was where the laser emplacement was supposed to be located.