Reality Matrix Effect (9781310151330) (37 page)

Milgrom turned to the bank of
equipment on her right and punched up an order for two cups of
coffee. A moment later, two steaming mugs appeared on a small
Trans-Mat receiving platform.

“Here you are,” she said, sliding a
cup across the desk to Rayna. Black with sugar, right?”

Rayna’s eyebrows jumped in surprise.
“Yes, but—”

“How did I know?  You forget, I
am director of the largest database the world has ever
known.”

Suddenly, Rayna felt queasy. “You mean
you keep that kind of information on everybody?”

Milgrom laughed and waved her hand
casually. “No, of course not. The system has plenty of safeguards
to prevent invasion of privacy. Of course, that doesn’t mean much
to Adm. Rensselaer. He’s been making all sorts of unsubstantiated
charges about the CDN—and me—lately.”

“Then, how...?”

“You entered it yourself when you took
that cup of coffee in the lobby.”

Rayna’s heart resumed beating. Milgrom
looked like the last hope for stopping Tauber. She seemed
trustworthy, but....

“Damn!”

Rayna jumped at Milgrom’s outburst.
Wheelchair drawn close to the terminal, the CDN director began
working single-mindedly at the keyboard, pausing on occasion only
to scowl at the screen and then press some more keys. After a
while, she shook her head unhappily.

“I’m sorry, Miss Kingman. I thought I
could manage to get away from this for an hour or so, but things
are happening very fast. I need to give it my complete attention.
We can reschedule your tour, but I’m afraid you’ll have to leave
now.”

Rayna leaned forward, craning her neck
for a better view of Milgrom’s terminal. “No,” she said, “I can’t
do that.”

Milgrom sat in stunned silence for
several seconds before she managed to say, “You don’t understand. I
apologize for being rude, but—”

“You
don’t understand,” said
Rayna. “This new crisis—” she jerked her head toward the terminal
“—it’s about the colonies, isn’t it?”

“Yes, and it’s urgent. I don’t have
time to be polite.”

Rayna stood and peered down at the
petite woman in the wheelchair. “Neither do I. I came here because
I have something vital to tell you. I don’t intend to leave
until  I’ve done just that.”  In a softer tone she added,
“Please. It’s important, and it may help.”

Milgrom looked at Rayna through
narrowed eyes, then patted the air. “Sit,” she said, tapping a key
on her console. “Derek?” 

 
A section of pseudowall to
Milgrom’s right flashed out of existence to reveal Derek Marsden’s
surprised face peering from a large communicator screen. “Still
checking, Althea,” he began. “I’m pretty sure that—”

“Put the trace on automatic,” his boss
told him. “I need you in here.”

“But you said—”

“I know what I said. Apparently, we
have some new information.”  Milgrom glanced at Rayna. “I need
you here now, Derek.”

Marsden shrugged, and the screen went
blank as the pseudowall closed over it. A moment later, the lanky
CDN man walked through a nearby wall.

“So far, I’m still going on hunches,”
he said, but I really think—”  He did a double-take as he
noticed Rayna’s wide-eyed stare. “Oops. Sorry. I keep forgetting
what it looks like to people who aren’t used to pseudowalls.” 
He grinned. “That’s just a door, Miss Kingman. We keep the
pseudowall over it whenever we have meetings. Gives us whatever
privacy we need. The combination of a restrictive sound envelope
and holographic projection does the job better than solid walls
usually do.”

 
Instinctively, Rayna searched
the ceiling over the section of wall through which Marsden had
entered until she located the generator tracks.

“Miss Kingman says she has some
important information for us,” Milgrom told him as he pulled the
vacant chair closer to the writing desk.

Rayna felt herself wither under the
gaze of the two CDN officials. Until this moment, she hadn’t given
much thought to exactly what she would say. Her throat was dry, and
her mind was a blank.

“I...uh...I’m not sure where to begin.
You did say at the debate that you were suspicious about recent
communications from the colonies, didn’t you?  The
communications about the Nitinol?”

Milgrom nodded, her expression
noncommittal.

“Well,” Rayna stammered, “I have
reason to believe that those communications were faked by someone
right here on Earth.” 

“Go on.”

Rayna sipped her coffee. How much
should she say?  That knowing look between them...the slight
stiffening of their features...the very lack of any comment on her
revelation—it could all add up to very cautious allies or very
dangerous adversaries. She shunted her fear into a back corner of
her mind. There was no time for that now. They were her only real
hope. Nevertheless, she would play it safe. Until she knew much
more about these two, she wouldn’t mention Keith’s name, or how
she’d gotten her information.

“The messages are part of a bigger
plan of some kind,” Rayna told them at last. “It seems to involve
high-level people all over the world, especially those with ties to
the Merchant Fleet.”

Marsden blanched. “Can you prove
that?”

“I came here hoping the CDN could help
get the proof!  We couldn’t go to the Merchant Fleet, after
all. It looks like even Ethan Rensselaer’s involved.”

“Who’s ‘we?’” Marsden challenged.
“Who’s your source?”

Rayna picked up her cup once more,
then quickly put it back down, trying covertly to steady her
shaking hands. This wasn’t going at all the way she’d expected.
Marsden was interrogating her as if she were a criminal. “I can’t
tell you who I’m working with,” she whispered. “It might endanger
someone I care a great deal about.”

Marsden’s expression was chilly and
unrelenting. “Then why should we believe you?”

Rayna looked from Milgrom to her
assistant and back again. She felt her shoulders sag. Funny. She’d
never considered the possibility that they wouldn’t believe
her.

“I just assumed that—”  She
swallowed, squared her shoulders and stood up. “My mistake. If you
don’t want to listen, I guess there’s nothing more I can do here.
I’m sorry I wasted your time.”

“Wait, Miss Kingman,” Milgrom said.
“Please. Sit down.” 

“Listen, Althea,” Marsden began, “we
need solid information from reliable sources, not just rumors.
Besides, we can’t let just anybody get too close to you. After that
second attack—”

“What?” Rayna croaked. “What second
attack?  You mean something happened after the
debate?”

“Yes. About two weeks ago. A package
addressed to Althea was booby-trapped. Old-fashioned, but
potentially effective. Fortunately, it went off prematurely, and no
one was hurt.”

“And you think that I...?”

“I’m a careful man, Miss Kingman. I’ve
learned the hard way that it pays to be careful. Althea’s a very
special lady, and I—”

“Derek,” said Milgrom, “you worry too
much. Besides, Miss Kingman has already saved my life.
Remember?  If she wanted to hurt me, she could have simply
walked away when that thug tried to club me. Would have saved
herself a nasty bump on the head in the bargain. No, I think we can
trust her. And I think we owe her an explanation, too.”

Marsden was all wary eyes and catlike
alertness, but he finally assented, and Rayna released the breath
she never realized she’d been holding. “I’d really appreciate that
explanation, Mrs. Milgrom.”

“Althea. My name’s Althea.  I
think it’s time for us all to be on a first-name basis.”

Rayna agreed, and Milgrom
continued:  “You’re perfectly correct about the faked
messages, Rayna. We can thank Derek, here, for that discovery, by
the way. He spotted things in the messages that most of us would
never have noticed.”

“It was the codes they used,” Marsden
volunteered, his hostility thawing a bit. “The ‘colonial’ messages
were sent using codes for a different colony than the initial
traces suggested as the true source.”

 
Rayna frowned. “I’m not sure
I—”

“It’s like this, Miss Kingman—uh,
Rayna. Normally, we just take it for granted that a message comes
from the person or place it claims to come from. You get a message
that says it’s from Luna, you figure it came from Luna. There’s no
reason to bother correlating the transmission code numbers with the
astronomical data. But this Nitinol ultimatum seemed so outrageous
that we decided to verify its point of origin.”

“Derek’s being modest, Rayna. He was
the only one in the office who thought about checking the origin.
He used a special communications tracer he developed back in his
Merchant Fleet days—”

“You were in the Merchant Fleet?”
Rayna interrupted, wrapping her suddenly cold hands around her
coffee cup.

Marsden nodded. “For a
while.”

 “
Yes,” said Milgrom, “Derek had
a terrible accident out in the colonies about three years ago.
Nearly killed him.”

“I don’t hold any grudge against the
colonists, though,” Marsden quickly added. “One drunk nearly cut my
head off, but afterward, the whole colony concentrated its 
resources on saving me. If it wasn’t for those colonists—and the
medical information in the CDN—I’d be dead.”

“And if it weren’t for what Derek
learned while he was in the Fleet, we’d have no evidence whatsoever
to suggest that the colonial ultimatum was anything but
genuine.”

 
Rayna suspected that she was
supposed to feel reassured now, but she remained uneasy. Maybe it
was just paranoia. Marsden’s Merchant Fleet connections made her
nervous—made her think of the ominous shadow in her dream. Still,
she already had revealed the essence of what she and Keith knew.
She had to trust someone. If not Marsden, then at least
Milgrom.

“If you have evidence that the
communications were faked, why hasn’t the Secretary-General
reopened negotiations with the colonies?”

“It’s not quite that simple,” Milgrom
answered. “The evidence we have isn’t entirely clear. It can be
interpreted in a number of ways, and the Secretary-General doesn’t
believe in taking chances. Until we can prove things aren’t as they
seem, he feels he has no choice but to base his actions on the
assumption that the messages—and the ultimatums—are
genuine.”

Rayna covered her eyes and shook her
head. “Then, if you can’t get the proof....”

“But we
can
get the
proof!  In fact, we almost have it now. Right, Derek?” 
Marsden nodded. “You see, Derek needed a new message he could track
as it was coming in. He was able to get the information to set up
his tracer by analyzing the data burst from the ‘colonial’
ultimatum—when they set the Nov. 1 deadline for tripling the price
of Nitinol.”

“Was that when they threatened to
increase the tab even more if we didn’t go along with
them?” 

“Yeah,” Marsden muttered. “They said
that after Nov. 1, they were going to start charging us a daily
storage fee for the Nitinol. The storage fee would be added to the
cost of redeeming the shipment. Pretty clever, actually. The longer
we take to agree to their demands, the higher the price
automatically goes.”

Rayna didn’t think it was so clever.
“I remember when the ultimatum was announced,” she said. “Even some
of my most sensible friends started talking about taking the
shipment back by force. Of course, the fact that no one had a clue
about where the Nitinol was didn’t seem to bother
anybody.”

Marsden shrugged. “What I don’t
understand is why they would have loused up a good thing like that
by destroying the Nitinol. If they really destroyed it.”

“According to my source,” Rayna said
carefully, “the Nitinol’s been destroyed all right, but it looks as
though that wasn’t really part of the plan.”

Marsden looked intrigued and seemed
about to pursue the subject further when Milgrom interrupted. “The
point is that back when we got the first messages about the Nitinol
demands, we still didn’t have any conclusive evidence about 
what was really going on. We had to wait for another
ultimatum.”

“That came this morning,” Marsden put
in.

Rayna could hardly breathe. “That’s
the crisis you were talking about earlier?”

Milgrom nodded. “We have the proof
now. Or at least we will when the trace is complete.”

“The trace is still running,” Marsden
added, “but it looks like an old trick some Merchant Fleet pals and
I used to play around with when we wanted to confuse the computers.
We rerouted the messages, altering the coding along the way, so
that if you didn’t know what was going on, you’d never be able to
follow it to the source.”

“As soon as Derek’s trace is final,
I’ll be able to take a printout to the United Nations and show the
world’s leaders that we’re not really dealing with renegade
colonists.” 

Momentarily, Rayna felt a weight lift
from her, but then Milgrom shook her head. “Unfortunately, it may
be too late to calm the public—especially after the destruction of
the Nitinol. We still have to depend on the colonies for our
Nitinol supplies, and people are awfully angry.”