Having glanced into the room the female welder had just exited, and having continued checking all around him since entering the place, he’d observed no facilities for computer access, so must stick with Malden until he came across something he could use.
‘How do you shut down the transformers?’ he asked. ‘Explosives?’
‘We just disconnect them from their power supply – no need to blow anything up.’
Malden surprised him with that, but then he guessed that, once the man assumed control here, he wanted to be sure not to get fried, should solar activity ramp up. Saul wondered how long after assuming control it would take Malden to achieve his goal then depart. Certainly he would need to make it impossible for anyone to shut down the Traveller engine, or in any other way divert the asteroid’s course down to the surface. Maybe it would be necessary for him to accesss readerguns here and depopulate the whole place first.
The droning inside Saul’s head grew yet more irritating and crackly as they finally reached the end of the incredibly long corridor. Next they entered a cageway penetrating down through numerous floors, before they traversed a short tubeway to a door that gave access on to a platform overlooking one side of a massive chamber, with steel steps leading down to the floor below. He could not help wondering what idiot had decided to install ordinary Earth-scale steps here.
At the centre of the great chamber, packed into a framework extending twenty metres on each side and rising from floor to ceiling, were what he presumed must be the transformers themselves, since these vaguely cuboid objects closely resembled antique wire and laminated-steel transformers. Supported by the quadrate scaffolding that filled the rest of the chamber, pan-pipes clusters of heavy ducts wove away from these transformers like some nightmare road junction, before finally disappearing through the walls. The entire area was strewn with cables connected to control boxes and access panels that seemed to be scattered at random. Fluorescent tubes attached to the scaffolding illuminated all of this, and the whole place stank of hot electronics. In Saul’s head, the droning became merely a mumble underneath a nerve-shredding mosquito whine. He couldn’t tell precisely how much of the sound lay inside his head or actually in the air around him, though Braddock nearly had to shout to issue his next order.
‘You know the drill!’ he said.
The soldiers separated into groups of four, taking different routes through the surrounding scaffolding towards the transformers. Malden, Braddock, Hannah and Saul himself descended the steps, or rather they launched themselves straight down to the floor and approached the transformers directly. As Malden led the way, Saul noticed a trickle of blood issuing from one of the man’s ears. Obviously the hardware sitting in his skull rested there about as uncomfortably as that in Saul’s own skull.
‘This is it!’ Malden yelled as they arrived below the massed transformers. He stepped over to a large console peppered with switches, plunger circuit-breakers, dials and buttons seemingly dating from the last millennium, but probably needed because the usual computer-control hardware and software would not be robust enough here. He began by clicking over a long line of twenty switches and the steady drone in the air stuttered, the mosquito whine in Saul’s head wavering. Next Malden turned to the row of twenty plunger circuit-breakers, and as he shoved each one down, the dial above it dropped to zero, and the noise decreased in level each time. When the noise finally ceased, Saul felt hollowed out and slightly bewildered.
‘It’ll take about a minute for the charge to dissipate,’ Malden explained.
The fizzing from Saul’s modem waned to nothingness, and he already began to
With more of the network opening to him, other links began to open, too, and one piece of traffic in particular called for Saul’s attention. He remained wary of it until he recognized it as something instituted by Janus before their integration: the results of the search for his sister. Something tightened inside him and he wanted to inspect this data at once, but time ran out. Suddenly, looming on a horizon of pure information, there appeared a great black shape like a clenched fist, or a thundercloud expanding. It was the comlife that had been hounding him from the first moment he had opened his mind to the net.
Malden sensed him at once, at last focusing on him within that virtual world. In the real world he turned and raised his machine pistol, aiming it straight at Saul’s face.
‘Withdraw,’ he instructed brusquely, ‘or die.’
Saul hesitated for just a moment, and Malden shifted his aim slightly, firing a burst just past him, ricochets zinging around behind. Saul began pulling himself out, shutting down his connection, but he kept his mind working at its optimum – all of his mind.
‘There’s something else here,’ he declared. ‘Comlife.’
‘Withdraw,’ Malden repeated,
Saul pulled out completely, and Malden lowered his weapon.
‘Reality wins every time,’ he said, and smiled.
Yes, it did, and in his enhanced state Saul saw the reality here with a painful clarity. The station schematic in his head revealed massive reconstruction inside, huge additions outside, but specifically it showed all points of access to this particular place. They would use low-velocity, soft-plastic slugs capable of penetrating spacesuits and human flesh, but less likely to damage the equipment located in here. A maintenance tunnel lay below those ridiculous steps, and that was one access point they wouldn’t be using. For why use such a narrow approach when those above it enabled such a much wider field of fire? Already every soldier present here would have been located precisely by the monitoring system.
He stepped back beside Hannah and tightened a hand around her upper arm, leaning in close. ‘Get ready to run,’ he urged her.
Braddock was gazing at them suspiciously, swinging his machine pistol back towards them. But soon enough he would find other distractions.
