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Chapter Eleven

 

A Crack in the Wall

Jessica shook uncontrollably. She planted her feet on the wall beneath the forward screen of the cocoon and pushed. She thrust herself into her chair, relaxed, and pushed again, until she had control of herself again. Too much adrenaline, not enough outlet. It reminded her of how she'd felt on the last night of her normal life, before the arrival of General Samuels, when she'd beaten the simulated Shiva.

She watched as the Angels took inventory. Everyone was still alive, despite the most vicious trap ever set in the Alabaster Hall. It seemed like a good omen.

For just a moment she studied the scene as herself, as Jessica. Then she flipped back into Morgan-simulation mode and started planning the next steps. Normally, you'd just drop a few booby traps at this doorway to prevent the repair mechs from scrupulously doing their job by going back up the hall and removing the rods so the blast shields could close. But the size of the welcoming committee this time suggested a more aggressive form of defense. Would Morgan hold one of the Angels back, keep him posted here as a guard? Maybe Axel?

No, no, of course not. Morgan had a much better option. He'd blow the roof, cause a cave-in, and booby-trap the debris. That would keep the repair mechs busy plenty long enough for this assault to succeed. Or fail.

 

Dragon's teeth! That had been one serious encounter with the minitanks. His heart had sunk when that last squad of enemy machines had charged out: what were the chances of anyone surviving a whirlwind of destruction like that?

But they'd come through it all right. In fact, no one had gotten killed; as nearly as he could tell, no one was even hurt. He wasn't sure, but he suspected that might be a first for the Angel teams. And against the toughest opposition yet, no less.

The Dealer smirked. The tailriding suckers who'd bet that none of the Angels would get off the ship were probably shaking in their shoes by now. He glanced down the screen of 'casts . . . yes, the odds were changing as he watched. He was very glad he was out of that kind of ride and into something better.

Three different 'casts had been placed on how they would repair the damage to the trailer. One plan seemed obviously better than the others, and he bought into it, though as with all the obvious choices, the odds meant he wouldn't make a lot of money off of it. His great opportunity still lay down the road somewhere.

 

Paolo's heart filled with pride to the bursting point. "Sofia," he cried, "There's something you have to see."

"Be with you in a minute," her voice came from somewhere deep in the bowels of the house. A few moments later she appeared. "What's up?"

"Take a look at this." Paolo pointed at a forecast in the 'castpoint.

Sofia looked at the forecast. It took a few seconds for her to pick out the special feature. At last she smiled. "That's Mercedes', isn't it?"

"Yes, that is our daughter's brand. She wrote the spec—" he pointed at Mercedes' carefully crafted text, "and let me say, as a professional in the field, she did a very good job with it."

"That's marvelous." She hugged him. "Did you take a position on this forecast? It seems only fitting that we should support our daughter."

"I'm afraid it wasn't a 'cast we're expert in. Not even the Predictor can predict everything, you know."

"Oh, I know." With a swift, darting motion, Sofia's finger found Paolo's ticklish spot, in the small of his back. Paolo jumped. "Yikes! Why did you do that?"

Sofia's smiled turned wicked. "To show the Predictor just how surprisingly unpredictable the world can be," she replied smugly.

* * *

Lars stood from his labors over the trailer's front axle. He slapped his hands together with the satisfied sound of a job well done. "Just like new," he announced. "Well, more or less like new."

CJ stared doubtfully at the results. "Great job, Lars." Sometimes being the team leader meant congratulating people on a job not so much done well as done at all.

And the axle bracing seemed liked it would hold until they got to the center-level slidechute, anyway. If it did hold that long, they'd get their trailer as far as Solovyev, the record holder, had gone.

Roni took off to scout ahead. CJ watched him depart, then looked over her shoulder. "Axel, let's blow this banana stand."

"A pleasure," Axel replied, pressing the button. The force of the explosion shook the floor. The chunk of ceiling brought down by the blast shook the floor again.

Akira surveyed the results as he threw a few last traps into the rubble. "Nice work, Axel. But you are not permitted to redecorate my house."

Axel sniffed. "I'm sure I could transform your place with subtle yet delightful enhancements."

"Mount up, everyone," CJ ordered. She climbed up to sit on the trailer, pellet gun in hand. A roboguard had totaled one of the bikes before Lars had turned the enemy into broken china, so they were a bike short. Lars would have to pedal for both of them; fortunately, for Lars this wouldn't be a big problem.

"We're outta here." CJ leaned over and patted the shoulder of Lars' armor frame. "Giddyap."

They started rolling, counter-clockwise around Shiva, toward the radial corridor that would take them deeper into the ship, to the slidechutes.

* * *

Lou paced one more time across the rec room, kicking another of Lanie's talking dolls across the pale green carpet. The doll landed between the two big, red recliners close to the small wallscreen. His breathing was still a bit ragged from the tension of battle. Now, to top it off, the exertion of the pacing was wearing him down. In short, he was getting too old for this sort of thing. He looked at his hands; they shook, and purple veins stood out on the mottled, wrinkled skin. Lou considered that if he didn't keep moving he'd probably fossilize in place. His son would take a petrified finger and place it on the mantle as a remembrance. Clenching his hand into a fist, Lou shook himself and marched back into his office.

He found Viktor's broad face on his touchscreen. Viktor began to speak, but Lou spoke faster and louder. "Viktor, what the hell happened to you? We almost lost 'em."

"It killed Anatoly, Lou," Viktor explained. "My grandson-in-law was with the fleet that set up the diversion for the Angels. His ship is gone. There were no survivors this time."

Lou closed his eyes. "I'm really sorry, Viktor." In the moment of silence that followed, he could hear wailing in the background.

Viktor shook his head. "I am sorry I let you down." He sat straighter. "This makes our job even more important."

"Very true," Lou said. "But that doesn't make it hurt any less."

"We thought we'd be better prepared for losing him, after the last time, when we thought he was dead." He smiled through tears. "We were wrong."

Lou searched desperately for something to say, to cheer his old friend and older enemy. "Listen, when this is over, I've been thinking I should bring Lanie up to visit."

Viktor's visage filled with astonishment. "Just to cheer me up, you will suffer the desolate winds and inhuman cold of Arctic Russia? To lighten my heart, you will bring the light of your life to this land where darkness rules?"

Lou knew he couldn't let it sound like a charity journey. "Since when have you had a heart? If you had a heart, it would have stopped by now, and you'd be dead. Nonsense, Viktor." He waved his hand. "I've been thinking for a while that Lanie should come and visit so she can appreciate the depths of human madness and the grotesque alien conditions to which humans can adapt. After all, the real reason your ancestors settled up there was to conduct a survival experiment, right? Figuring that if they could live in Murmansk, then living on the Moon would be easy?"

Viktor waved a pudgy finger at him. "You are a wily fox, old friend. I will hold you to your promise to visit." Lou heard another wail from another room in Viktor's house. Viktor glanced over his shoulder. "In the meantime, it looks like our heroes are okay for the moment, and I must attend my family. I'll get in touch in a couple of hours."

Lou nodded. "A couple of hours it is. I'll keep an eye on the Angels, make sure they don't get into any trouble we can't get them out of."

Viktor's image on the touchscreen turned dark. Lou closed his eyes and leaned back in his chair. He considered taking a nap, decided against it, and fell asleep.

* * *

Peter sat frowning, pressing the replay button again and again. The movement seemed so mechanical Selpha wondered if he were really listening, or if he were trapped in some compulsion of his own. She had worked with her son long enough, though, that she didn't think it was just a meaningless fixation: she thought she could tell from the way his frown changed shaped, his mind was actively engaged.

Selpha listened to the swatch of sound he repeated. It started after the Angels had killed the last enemy robot, as they stepped from the Alabaster Hall into the sandstone corridor. It ended after the explosion that brought down the ceiling. She couldn't hear anything interesting at all.

At last Peter stopped the playback. His face relaxed. "There's a crack in that wall," he said.

"Are you sure?" Selpha asked. She knew that he would say yes, that he was quite sure, but the length of his hesitation before he made the assertion would tell her his real level of confidence.

The hesitation did not last as long as she had expected. "I'm quite sure. There's a crack in the wall."

"Thank you," Selpha said, and turned to her terminal.

* * *

Mercedes watched Blake laughing as he earmarked another forecast for her attention. Mercedes found herself joining him. She looked at the sketch. "There's a crack in the wall?"

Blake shook his head. "I don't know how they could possibly have figured that out. And I can't imagine who could use the information for anything even if it were true."

Mercedes continued the commentary. "And there's no chance at all that this forecast will get resolved. Nobody is going to go back there with a sledge hammer to see if it's true. I predict that in forty-eight hours this forecast will get scrubbed from the point, unawarded." She shrugged. "But you're the one who taught me that even the most obscure, irrelevant forecast can supply valuable insight to someone, if the forecast is disseminated widely but filtered effectively." She cleared her throat. "Ours is not to question why, ours is but to write, not lie."

"Ouch! Hoist on my own petard," Blake said, recognizing his own words. He shrugged. "Well, no matter how useless this 'cast is, writing the spec will be good practice." He smiled wickedly. "That's why I'm giving it to you."

"Thanks." Mercedes sighed, but just for effect. She was perfectly happy working some live forecasts that weren't life-threatening. "Trillian, work mode."

* * *

Normally, the forecast would have penetrated Paolo's filters as a low-priority notification—the 'cast had a slight relevance to his analysts. Instead, however, it jumped to his attention because he'd put a priority acceptance on anything with his daughter's brand on it. He read the 'cast, passed it around his team, and went back to work on Crockett II's deductions. A couple of minutes later, thunderstruck, he realized the meaning of the forecast.

No one had ever found, or even suggested there might be, a flaw in a wall before. Indeed, to the best of his knowledge, no one had ever found a defect of any kind in any of the ships, aside from the damage created by the bombs set off by the Angels themselves. There was a perfection in the manufacture of the Shivas that still made the best of human engineering look like a backwater hack job. A fracture in the wall would constitute a remarkable change in Shiva engineering.

But what if the fracture were intentional? Or, more likely, what if the fracture represented a change from the original construction of the Shivas?

One of the surprises in Shiva V had been the layout of the corridors at the end of the Alabaster Hall. In the previous Shivas, there had not only been a corridor running the circumference of the ship, to the clockwise and counter-clockwise directions. There had also been a corridor running straight down the radius, toward the central axis and the slide chutes. The recon bots and birds that preceded the Angel One assault had been rudely surprised to find they could not go straight down that hall. What had been the shortest path in Shiva IV simply didn't exist in Shiva V.

Now Paolo thought he understood. The repair mechs on board Shiva V had sealed off that corridor! They'd done a great job too, by human standards. But even a great job by human standards did not reach the inhuman standards of Shiva's original engineers. Though the improvised seal had no visible seam, beneath the surface the welding of the new section of wall had left behind an imperfection. That imperfection had all the characteristics of a "crack," a fracture in the ceramic latticework.

Shiva could only have decided to seal that corridor because it knew that the corridor exposed a weakness. It was another indication that supported the oft-posited theory that the Shivas were in communication, that each Shiva learned from the experiences of the previous one.

But from Paolo's point of view, another point was even more important. For his predictions of the layout of the ship, he had to know where the corridors were even if they were sealed—all his team's algorithm's were set up to analyze the unsealed layout. To succeed, Paolo had to know if there were other sealed corridors. He had to know if there were other cracks.

He turned back to his wallscreen and laid out several new items. First, he wrote a forecast on the 'castpoint asserting that the wall fracture was really a sealed-over corridor. Second, he posted a prize on the board for any other fracture forecasts that proved correct. Third, he bought into the original prediction that the crack in the wall really existed. After all, his identification of why and how such a crack could be there was supporting evidence that the crack existed, and significantly increased the odds that the forecast was correct.

Paolo sat back with satisfaction. This had been a very good little piece of work.

* * *

Jessica muttered the demand repeatedly, but no one could hear. Finally she shrieked it, though she knew that even this would not make a difference, "Morgan, ask if there's a crack in the control room wall!"

The situation seemed obvious to her, now that someone had figured out what had happened to the third corridor from the hall. The original forecasts had been right: the Gate to the control room was in its standard location—but the Gate had been sealed the way this corridor had been sealed.

Of course, right or wrong, the stakes were huge. They had to buy the best assessment they could get, probably with a direct subcontract to the person who had made the forecast in the first place.

Why wasn't Morgan acting?

* * *

CJ was still alive! Alive! The pleasure of the thought rolled with thick sweetness in Morgan's mind, like a chocolate caramel yielding its rich flavor across the tongue. Everyone was still alive.

More than anything, Morgan wanted to whisper in CJ's ear. He needed to tell her he loved her. But with over four billion people watching and listening to every word he said, it was quite impractical. He smiled unhappily, remembering how pre-Crash politicians had complained about the public microscope. Those bumpkins had had no idea what real scrutiny was like.

He considered shutting down the cameras so he could talk to her. But the cameras had just saved her life, and would have to save her again. He had no idea what little tidbit picked up as they sped down the halls might make the crucial difference. The cameras must remain inviolate.

Still, he couldn't keep it all bottled up. He spoke softly into the microphone. "CJ?" he asked with all the tenderness he could express. He knew it could not carry the full weight he desired, but he had to try.

He could see her in the view from Akira's vidcam, sitting astride the trailer while Lars sweated for both of them. She looked queenly, perched upon a throne held aloft by her subjects. She turned to the camera, knowing that he would be watching. Her eyes glowed, a reflection of the tenderness in his voice. Her smile caressed him. "Me too," she replied. She turned back, to face the future.

It was so little, but it was enough. He could concentrate again.

* * *

Jessica activated her connection to the General. "Samuels," she said in an urgent voice, "Morgan's losing it. He loves that girl, and he's losing it."

The General looked at her with harried concern. He was closer to showing stress than Jessica had ever seen. "Explain," he snapped.

Jessica ran through her deductions about the control room entrance. Then she voiced her concerns about why Morgan had missed the possibility.

Samuels nodded. "Right or wrong, we need to pursue your analysis."

Jessica pressed on. "So you'll tell Morgan to subcontract with the original forecaster to see if the Gate is sealed up?"

The General shook his head. "Way too distracting if I bring it up."

Jessica considered this, puzzled. "So you want me to tell him? He doesn't know me from Adam."

Samuels made a dismissive wave of his hand. "Personal suggestions are inappropriate in the current context. No, Jessica, I want you to drive this matter to a conclusion. And then use the obvious method to tell Morgan about it." Samuels explained further.

Jessica laughed. "Of course. It is obvious, isn't it?" She pursed her lips. "I can see I still have a ways to go."

"Don't worry about it, Jessica. Just hurry."

* * *

Selpha studied her screen with surprise, pleasure, and a certain amount of disbelief. Earth Defense had just asked her to do a special analysis for them. Seeing the request, the merits of the analysis were obvious.

Was there a crack in the wall where the Gate should have been? Given the new forecast on the 'castpoint derived from Peter's forecast, the question and conclusion were obvious.

Earth Defense wasn't even demanding that she be correct with her results. They were just asking for her best judgment, her expertise, and her confidence level in her results. The contract would take her a considerable distance toward her goal, and she couldn't lose. It gave her a light, airy feeling as she endorsed the contract.

"Okay, Peter, we have a very special job to do," she said in her most gentle, patient voice. She hyperlinked through the Web-stored recordings of the Angel One assault, to last battle where Hikmet had died. The visuals were so violently ghastly, it was hard for her to concentrate while they ran. Peter wouldn't have to deal with the sight of the horrors, of course, but the audio was almost as bad. "I know this is going to be very hard, Peter. I know it is very noisy, and it'll be hard to understand. But it is really important that we listen very carefully, and see if we can tell if any of these walls are cracked like the other one was. Can we do it, Peter?"

Peter bobbed his head. "Okay, Momma."

Selpha handed control of the recording over to Peter, almost as worried as she was hopeful.

* * *

Paolo shook his head at his own inadequacy. Aargh! How could he have missed it? Now that the 'cast was up, it seemed obvious. And it was in his field of expertise. He should have been the one to post that 'cast. Blast it, he himself had made the deduction that led to this next natural conclusion.

On the other hand, with a couple billion active participants, it really shouldn't surprise him if, even in his own field, people regularly beat him to the punch. His failure to draw the obvious conclusion beautifully illustrated the flaw in the Web's foolish gossip about the Predictor: even if you were thousand times more likely to root out good forecasts than anyone else, you would have less than one chance in a thousand of being the first one to invent a new analysis. Of course, Paolo, thought with a determined smile, he had better than a mere thousand-fold improvement on the average. Nonetheless, the principle still stood.

Paolo alerted the rest of his team to the new forecast. They just had to come up with a good analysis of this issue, not only for profit, but also to save the Angels from a terrible mistake whichever way it turned out.

He looked at the preliminary results coming in from his team and felt a touch of sorrow. It would be a lot easier for everyone if the forecast were correct, and the Gate was just in the same old place, just a little harder to open. But according to his own preliminaries, it wasn't true. Even adjusting the analysis to assume that the third corridor from the Alabaster Hall had been sealed—an assumption that went beyond the confidence level they could assign to the proposition—other anomalies in the construction of this ship suggested that the entrance had been relocated along with the innermost ring of robot repair bays.

Preliminary results weren't enough for something this important. Every reducible doubt had to be removed. Paolo shot off a consulting request to the brand that had first theorized about the fracture, to see what additional information he could buy to fold into his analysis.

* * *

Selpha's eyes glowed in satisfaction. Now that someone had posted the sealed-entrance forecast, requests for information were pouring in from all over the world. She had over a dozen consulting contracts in her hand, all asking for her best answer on the same question that Earth Defense had asked: Was there a crack in the hall where Buzz Hikmet had died?

Unfortunately, Peter's analysis was inconclusive almost to the point of uselessness. Consequently Selpha felt she couldn't charge a lot for the answer—better to set up a quality relationship with these people, in preparation for future contracts—but still, it was almost free money. She sent to each requester the same careful assessment she had made for Earth Defense.

Upon completing the contracts, she realized there were probably other people who would be interested in the results. She posted her assessment as a simple document on several of the EDA-related eMarkets. In the next half hour, she sold almost seventy copies to people and companies around the world. She still kept the price low, though, for her summary conclusion was not very exciting: amidst the noise and vibration of the battle, she could find no evidence of a crack in the wall from the Angel One recordings.

* * *

Jessica drew a deep breath. She watched as the odds seesawed wildly. The trading volume started to stabilize the assessment, but as the volatility waned so did the early enthusiasm for the 'cast. The odds favoring a sealed Gate in the usual location fell below fifty percent, and only leveled off around thirty-five percent.

A soft ping announced the activation of her window to General Samuels. "Don't be disappointed," he said. "You had a brilliant insight, and we had to pursue it."

"I probably shouldn't have bothered to post the 'cast at all, after the initial report from fracture analysts."

"No, posting it was the right thing to do. With as much uncertainty as they had, it only made sense to pursue the matter further, to see if anyone in the assembled multitudes could make a better assessment." He shrugged. "Actually, it looks like the assembled multitudes did make a better assessment, just not the one we'd hoped for." He raised his fist, thumb extended upward in a sign of upbeat confirmation. "Keep at it."

Jessica smiled wanly. "Back to work," she said. She turned her attention back to the seven screens that represented Morgan's world.

 

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