Cyber Rogues (3 page)

The universe blanked out.

“What in Christ! . . .” a voice yelled.

Cummings had just reached the door with Paskoe close behind. Fields was a few feet away, just beyond the end of the vehicle.

Everything around them vanished abruptly into an opaque sheet of gray. At the same moment Paskoe felt the ground shudder beneath his feet. The mass of the crawler above them lurched visibly as if it had been struck an immense blow on the opposite side. For a moment he had the sickening feeling that it was going to topple over on top of them.

A titanic blast of dust, debris and boulders had smashed into the far side of the vehicle and sprayed past it on every side. Mercifully they had been in its lee shadow. Just a few seconds earlier and they would have been caught unprotected. And just as suddenly it was gone.

Paskoe was standing frozen to the spot, still with no idea of what had happened. In front of him Cummings was clinging to the handrail by the door, his face ashen through his visor and his arm gesturing weakly toward a point behind Paskoe’s shoulder.

“Jerry! . . .” Cumming’s voice came through in a strangled gasp. “Jerry’s gone!” Paskoe turned and stared dazedly at the spot where, a few seconds previously, Fields had been standing, just beyond the crawler’s protective shadow. There was nobody there.

And then the blast came again, like the discharge of a gigantic shotgun that fired moonrock. And again, and again, and again . . . and again. Paskoe found himself on the ground pressing himself against the vehicle’s tracks while the concussions thudded through his body, and the crawler trembled under the repeated impacts of boulders cannoning off its sides and spinning crazily away into the maelstrom of dust. His helmet touched the structure. A sound like a building collapsing onto an enormous kettledrum exploded in his ears. He lost count of the concussions. Maybe ten, twenty . . . His brain had seized up.

He was lying by the track of the crawler, his heart pounding and his body shaking. Every inch of his skin felt cold and wet in his suit. It had stopped. He waited, barely daring to breathe. The tension that held him keyed up waiting for it to begin again refused to let go. But nothing happened. He opened his eyes slowly and looked up.

Cummings was lying on his back with his legs tangled in the steps that bridged the gap between the ground and the floor of the entrance hatch. He looked as if he had been bowled backward out of the doorway just as he had been in the act of climbing in. Still shaking, Paskoe struggled to his feet, rivulets of sticky moondust pouring down the creases in his suit.

“Tim . . . Tim can you hear me?” He lurched over to where Cummings lay motionless, then stopped. A slab of ice-cold horror dropped in his stomach as he saw the shattered visor. And then a feeble voice groaned in his helmet.

“Holy Christ, what happened?”

“Tim? . . .” Paskoe’s voice was almost sobbing with relief. “Tim, are you okay in there?” The sprawled figure moved, and gingerly extracted a leg from the steps above it.

“I can’t see,” Cummings’s voice came again, now sounding less disoriented. “Something hit me in the face.” The other leg freed itself. Paskoe stooped and helped Cummings to sit up. “Argh! . . . My chest! I think I got hit by a shuttle booster.”

“Can you stand up? Easy now. I gotcha.”

“Take it slowly.” Cummings’s words came between heavy breaths. “I think I might have collected a cracked rib.”

Paskoe hoisted Cummings to his feet and guided his hand to the rail by the door. The chest panel of Cummings’s suit was smashed and the visor an opaque mess of fractured crystal. Paskoe moved around to get at the manual auxiliary controls on the backpack, which appeared none the worse for having taken the impact of Cummings’s fall.

“Your visor’s cracked but it looks like it’s holding,” he said. “I’m dropping the pressure in your suit to relieve the stress on it. As far as I can tell you’ll be okay for a while, but we ought to get you into another one ASAP.”

“What happened?” Cummings asked again.

“I don’t know. If there was a war on I’d have said we just had a near miss from a salvo of 108’s. Maybe it was a meteorite swarm. I don’t know.” While he was speaking, Paskoe was peering into the lower cabin of the crawler. The floor was covered in dust and some larger debris. Shafts of light poured through several jagged holes that had been torn in the far wall. Presumably whatever had made the holes had carried right through and caught Cummings head-on just as he was entering from the opposite direction.

“What . . . What about Jerry?” Cummings asked haltingly.

“He got caught in the open.” Paskoe turned from the door and began scanning their immediate vicinity. “I guess he must have got blown away. Bad news I . . . Just a sec. I think I see him.” He could just make out the twisted figure of Fields, crumpled in a mound of dust that had appeared at the foot of a rounded boulder twenty or thirty feet away. The layer of gray powder covering it was so thick that Paskoe had at first dismissed it as an irregular grouping of rocks. Cummings remained silent, still clinging to the handrail while he regained his breath.

“It’s him,” Paskoe said. “He’s not moving. Looks like he might have been hit pretty bad. Stay there and don’t move. I’m going over.”

In a few slow bounds he covered the distance to where Fields was lying, and began digging the dust aside frantically with his gauntleted hands. Field’s helmet was intact. Paskoe scraped the layer of caked moondust from the visor and peered at the face inside.

It was pale, eyes closed; no sign of life. But at least, there were none of the gruesome signs that would follow decompression. There was hope then. Working swiftly, Paskoe uncovered the rest of the figure.

“What’s the news?” Cummings’s voice sounded in his helmet. It was tense, obviously prepared for the worst.

“Could be worse,” Paskoe replied. “He hasn’t decompressed, but if he’s alive he’s out cold. His pack’s all smashed up so he won’t last long if we don’t get him out. Must have caught a big one right in the back.”

“Any sound of breathing?”

“Can’t tell. I couldn’t hear anything even with my gain wound right up, but I think his radio’s probably dead.”

At that moment another voice came through, sounding shaky.

“Kal, is that you? Are you guys still alive out there?”

“Michel!” Paskoe swung his head instinctively to look back at the crawler. “You’re okay. What’s the score inside?”

“The worst damage is downstairs,” Chauverier answered. “We’ve lost pressure up here, but it wasn’t explosive—just small holes. The regulators compensated long enough for me to get a helmet on.”

“How’s Joe?” Paskoe inquired.

“Knocked himself out on the center bulkhead. I put his helmet on for him. He’s still out but he should be okay. I heard you talking about Jerry. How’s Tim?”

“He seems okay but his visor’s flaked, so he can’t see. He’s outside the door. Right now the problem is Jerry. We’ve got to get him out. Did you say the cabin’s zeroed?”

“Everything’s dead,” Chauverier replied. “We’ll have to use a survival tent and wait for a VTOL to show up. I’ll eject one now. Stay clear. I’ll be out in a minute with a couple of suits and give you a hand.”

“What about Joe?” Paskoe asked.

“He’ll be okay here for a while. We can bring him out when the tent’s set up.”

“Okay.”

A package resembling a bale of rubber ejected itself from its stowage point near one end of the vehicle, landed a few feet away and immediately inflated into a bright-orange six-man survival tent. Paskoe freed Field’s lower legs from the rubble and began hauling the still inert form across toward it. Just as he reached the tent, two suit-kits sailed out of the crawler door, closely followed by Chauverier. He landed easily on his feet, scooped up the kits and began loping over to where Paskoe was dragging Fields through the outer portal of the tent’s airlock.

“Something just went past me,” Cummings called over the radio.

“That was me,” Chauverier told him. “We’re getting Jerry into the tent. I’ve got a suit here for you. We’ll come back for you in a second before we pressurize the lock.”

“Okay. I’ll be here.”

“Say . . .” Chauverier’s voice suddenly took on a new note—one of disbelief. Paskoe was inside the lock propping Fields into a more comfortable position. Chauverier had straightened up and was staring out at something beyond the tent.

“What’s up?” Paskoe asked.

“Come back out for a moment and get a look at this,” Chauverier said. Back at the crawler. Cummings listened in silence. Then he heard Paskoe’s voice: “Jesus!”

“What is it?” Cummings asked them.

“Our truck,” Paskoe answered. “Did you ever see a tin can after a grenade went off inside it? If anybody had been inside that they’d just be jelly on the walls. It’s been turned right over.”

“Look at the other side of it,” Chauverier suggested,

Paskoe gasped, The entire center section of the ridge had been neatly blown away to leave two small isolated humps at what had been its ends. The gap that now existed between the humps was churned into a tortured tangle of tightly overlapping craters.

“How in the name of . . .” Paskoe began, but Cummings broke in:

“What is it?”

“We’ve been bombed!”

“How?”

“I don’t know. Something crazy’s going on somewhere.”

“You’ll see for yourself later,” Chauverier came in. “Right now let’s get you into the tent before that facepiece blows.” With that he bounded back to where Cummings was standing, led him over to the tent and guided him into the lock, tossed in the suit-packs and ducked in after them. Paskoe was already inside and waiting to seal the flap. Within seconds the walls of the lock were stiffening as the pressure began building up.

Ten minutes later Joe had recovered, been updated on the situation and had announced that he could make his own way down from the crawler. Inside the tent Chauverier had pronounced Fields to be alive, suffering from shock, oxygen starvation and a dislocated shoulder, but in no immediate danger. A trace of color had returned to his face and his pulse was getting stronger. On the other side of the tent Cummings was pulling on one of the spare suits while Paskoe was using his pocket viewpad to inform base of events.

“The comsats picked up your truck’s auto-distress transmission fifteen minutes ago,” the day supervisor at Reinhold informed him from the screen, “A couple of VTOLs are on the way. They should arrive any minute now. What happened?”

“That’s what I was hoping you turkeys might tell us!” Paskoe yelled, now restored to his normal self. “Some asshole just bombed us, that’s what! Are you telling me you don’t know anything about it?”

“Nix.” The supervisor looked at a loss. “We just got the distress call and sent out the VTOLs. That’s all I know.”

“Oscar Zebra Two-Five-Five Leader to Reinhold Control,” another voice interrupted. “We’ve got ’em in sight. Two trucks and a tent, one truck turned over. They’re on the fringe of what looks like a fresh pattern of impact rays centered on a crater cluster. We’re going down now.”

“They’re here,” Paskoe said needlessly. “I’ll talk to you later.” He cut out the viewpad, closed it and began returning it to his thigh pouch. He stopped, frowned thoughtfully for a second, and then reopened the view-pad and touched in a rapid-fire sequence of commands. An instant later he was through to the Executive Command Interpreter at Tycho. A few more commands yielded the words:

JOB 2736/B. 72/Z72

COMPLETED AS SCHEDULED

EVALUATION REQUESTED

OPERATION RE-EXECUTE REQUESTED?

PLEASE ADVISE.

“Christ!”

“What’s wrong?” Chauverier inquired, turning his head from the viewing port, through which he had been watching the first of the VTOLs as it dropped into sight. Paskoe pointed at the viewpad.

“It was those idiot computers at Tycho! They’re asking if they did okay . . . Wanna know if we need a repeat performance!” He steadied the viewpad against his knee, and hastily hammered in with shaking fingers:

NO!

ABORT! ABORT! ABORT!

ACKNOWLEDGED.

Came back the impassive reply.

PART ONE

MOBILIZATION

CHAPTER ONE

New York stretched to greet the sunshine of a new day.

The autocab was just one of innumerable silver beads strung out along the tangle of shining threads that wreathed the base of the monolithic city. Below and on either side, rectangular cliffs and chasms of glass, concrete and duroplastic marched stiffly by, revealing occasional glimpses of the nearby Hudson River.

The figure staring out of the otherwise empty six-seat vehicle was still some years below forty and on the tall side of average in height. His features held a sharp-lined ruggedness that was accentuated by his ragged droopy moustache. An ample mane of straight black hair, and the swarthy hue of his skin, were relics of the Amerind blood that his father’s side of the family boasted in its early ancestry. Slightly hollowed cheeks with high-set bones that gave his eyes a permanently keen and narrowed look echoed the same heritage. His loose-limbed frame was sprawled untidily across one corner of the cab and casually attired in an open-necked shirt covered by a lightweight wind-breaker, but the thoughts going through his head that morning were not as serene as his appearance might have suggested.

This time, Dr. Raymond Dyer told himself, it had to stop. Over the previous six months he and Sharon had had some good times and a lot of fun—exactly the no-strings, for-as-long-as-it-lasts kind of thing to be expected between a thirty-four-year-old male divorced for six years, and a single girl who had come to the big city for the sole purpose of finding out what life was all about. At least that was how it had begun, and could have remained if only . . . He sighed his expression to himself. Why did women always have to go and take a good thing too far?

The fingers of his outstretched arm drummed a tattoo on the window ledge. He frowned at them moodily for a few seconds.

He was rationalizing the whole thing, he admitted to himself. Who was he trying to fool? Sharon hadn’t really said anything that hinted at plans for things getting any more serious than he himself wanted—not if he was honest. The truth of the matter was he was getting bored with the whole thing.