3. No One Coming
This armor had its own oxygen supply. It was not a spacesuit, not quite airtight, but there were heavy filters to prevent the duelist from breathing in clouds of chaff. Menelaus turned up the oxygen gain, closed his eyes, and concentrated.
Gimme an idea, Mister Hyde, he thought to himself. Then he reminded himself that no one but himself was Mr. Hyde, and there was no one coming to his aid.
Despite his brave words, the way the deck was stacked now, he was going to die more likely than not, and Del Azarchel’s men were going to swarm up the tower cable to the empty Hotel of Sorrow, and Rania would awake from dreams of rose-colored pleasure to find herself a widow and a prisoner. Was Blackie the kind of man who would make and carry out a threat, for example, to ignite one city a day every day the Princess did not agree to marry him?
Montrose with shame remembered the way he and Del Azarchel used to talk about women when they had a drink or three under their belts. In those days, Blackie had been the kind of man unwilling to hesitate when there was a girl he wanted; and they told each other how easy it was to get a woman to surrender to the inevitable. Montrose realized he did not really know a damn thing about the way Blackie was now. Knowing a man for a few months when he was young did not tell you anything, did it?
The question was: So how the hell was he to stop Del Azarchel’s Conquistadores from seizing the tower?
One answer was to call Rania, and tell her to ascend, then radio the Hermetic crew, and arrange a rendezvous. However, the cold facts of orbital mechanics prevented that solution. By having the great ship pass overhead during the wedding ceremony earlier that day, the low Earth orbit now put the vessel on the other side of the planet. The ship could not make rendezvous with the asteroid called High Quito for three days.
A maneuvering burn could kick her into a higher, slower orbit, or a lower, faster one, but even a fast orbit, one dangerously grazing the outer atmosphere, could not get the ship here before dawn: and in any case “here” did not mean the geostationary point where the tower top was anchored. This would involved a second burn to move to a higher orbit, and at that point the energy gained from slinging around the Earth in a low orbit would mean the velocities would not match. In orbital mechanics, “here” meant a match of six velocity elements, and it did not mean sailing past a point in space at a high speed, waving through a porthole as you receded.
Disabling the spider cars would prove no solution. Del Azarchel or his men could reach her before the three days passed, perhaps with an aerospace plane flying to High Quito, perhaps with a spare spider car shipped to the base of the tower.
Another answer would be to alert the press: except that the press were creatures of Del Azarchel, his bewigged Psychoi class, his “Psychics” or whatever they were called.
Another answer would be to alert the Aristocrats, Pneumatics, Clergy, and Plutocrats of this strangely caste-bound world, and see what allies would rush to the aid of the Princess: except, of course, no one would be rushing anywhere, since the modern world was abnormally free of roads and bridges, and abnormally dependent on the subterranean vacuum-tube depthtrain system, which was abnormally dominated by the World Power Syndicate, and whose computerized switching system (by now, if Del Azarchel was not a fool) linked into control by the Exarchel Machine. Any forces gathering on the surface could be picked off by orbit-to-surface fire. Rail lines, highways, and ships were notoriously easy to spot from orbit, and had been ever since the First Space Age.
During the remainder of the descent, Menelaus had ample opportunity to think, and when thinking prevailed nothing, to worry, and then to fret, and then he opened the elevator liquor cabinet, and realized that between the awkwardness of his gauntlets and the heavy cheek-guards of his helmet, he could not get the whiskey bottle to his lips in an open and unbroken condition.
And when he unscrewed his gauntlets for the second time, he caught a glimpse of red metal. After a swig or nine of fine Kentucky whiskey burning in his throat and warming his insides to a toasty glow, he decided to go data-fishing, to see if there was any angle he had overlooked.
First, he called the top of the buried antennae leading to Pellucid, and checked on growth rates. The Van Neumann machine was doubling its mass every forty days, and the fail-safe built into its design had worked the one occasion that a volcanic eruption had carried some of the material to the surface: compared to the temperature and pressure beneath the mantle of the Earth, the surface world was an icy near-vacuum, and so when several pounds of modified diamond crystal had floated to the surface of a lava flow, it had broken down into black carboniferous dust.
The machine had a processing volume entirely out of proportion with the software he had been able to download: it was like a library of ten thousand acres, with only one shelf occupied by a few reference books. It was smart enough, however, to prioritize non-rhythmic changes in its environment, to which it was more sensitive than Montrose’s design specifications could account for.
He looked at the data first as graphs, then as hieroglyphs, then imagined as a polydimensional matrix in his mind’s eye. He laughed when he realized what these data were. The high energy of the passing vactrains, shooting like so many magnetically-accelerated bullets through the tangle of Brachistochrone curves below the mantle of the Earth, set up a resonance effect and echo, which the Pellucid crystals could pick up. The crystals were hearing the electromagnetic rumblings of passing trains. These echoes were of different nuances of pitch and consistency, and Pellucid had automatically filed them according to a system of phenotypes.
Pellucid also flagged the shipments that did not match a soothing system of patterns. Montrose realized he was looking at the military movements of the recent weeks, days, hours, and minutes. A simple set of calculations in his head, checked against calculations run through his amulet, and he found he had quite by accident stumbled across a fairly clear estimate of where the world’s soldiers were, were their gear was being collected, and so on.
But there were two groups of migration-patterns, and they had peaked at different times.
The older group consisted, not of one or two, but many unscheduled stops that had been made at the base of the tower over the last few weeks, and these did not fit the much more recent motion-pattern of Del Azarchel’s troopers. They were round trips to depots in Florida and Astrograd and various seaports, including many stops at Monaco.
Montrose turned the information over and over in his mind until, as if on its own, the pieces clicked into place. With his amulet, and Rania’s security overrides and her password lists, he was able to call up an image of the tower’s blueprints and wiring schematics, but also able to open loading invoices, personnel lists, duty rosters, and, in short, Montrose mapped out where any of those unscheduled trains from several weeks ago, passing through Quito, had deposited their cargoes.
He halted the spider car when it reached the cable stanchion. He was at the bottom of the tether proper, about a half-mile above the ground. Here, at the top of the superscraper that formed the tower’s massive base, there was a small platform, windows pressurized due to altitude, and a bank of elevators leading farther down. He rode a freight elevator down only a few score feet, and stepped out onto a catwalk, and the clash of his metal feet sent sharp echoes reflecting from distant bulkheads.
This highest floor was not an observation deck or restaurant (those things were reserved for even higher altitudes). This vast cylindrical space was a warehouse: balcony upon balcony reached down hundreds of feet, beyond the range of sight. Loading platforms were protruding like metal tongues into the air of this central well, for dangling cranes like freakish chandeliers to load freight into spider cars considerably bigger than the luxury-passenger car he had been using.