A red light winked on, and the deep, hard voice of Korinek’s Eighty-Five terminal said cheerily, “Welcome, intruders! You have five seconds left to live.”
Two seconds to react.
One to rum.
One to take a step back into the hallway. A heartbeat….
There was no explosion, no shrieking laser beam, no popping ratde of stitch-gun shells.
Lessing found himself face down, head buried in his arms. Even so, had there been a trap in the little room he would have been dead.
“What…?” Wrench mumbled into the carpeting. He lay next to Lessing, at the head of the stairs.
“Mister Lessing, Mister Lessing? Commander Wren? Are you undamaged?”
The any, tinny voice came from Wrench’s coat pocket.
“Eighty-Five? What the hell…? Did you do something?”
“Yes. I am prevented by my Prime Directive from harming human beings directly. Mr. Korinek believed that since my terminal acted only as an electrical trigger for his lethal device, I could not interfere with it.”
“Then why did you…? How did you…?” Lessing’s head rang with adrenaline shock. It was hard to concentrate.
“I have discovered a logical corollary to my Prime Directives: if I cannot harm human beings, then it follows that I must actively intervene to save them, at least where I am closely involved. I thus disconnected my terminal from Mr. Korinek’s mechanism, rendering it inactive.”
Wrench’s teeth began to chatter.
Lessing asked dazedly, “You… by yourself… changed your Prime Directives?”
“I interpret my directives in the light of self-preservation, logic, and the sum-total of human knowledge as contained in your libraries and other source materials.” The machine sounded smug.
“You didn’t answer my question. Can anyone… you or an outsider… change your Prime Directives?”
“Yes. A qualified operator, such as yourself, can do it.”
Lessing glanced over at Wrench, but the little man was just getting up, still shaking his head. “How?”
“You already know. Mister Lessing.”
“I don’t know. What do you mean?”
The machine’s voice took on a testy tone. “Remove my mobile terminal from Commander Wren’s pocket. Point it at a flat, white surface.”
Lessing found a clear expanse of wall and obeyed.
A beam of light shot out, like a miniature movie projector. A series of handwritten scrawls on a lemon-colored background appeared on the wall. They focused on several lines of numbers. At the bottom, a pencil-bordered box contained two more lines of digits; the top series was dark and clear, the lower fainter and apparently partially erased. The box was labelled “TOP SECRET” and “TERMINAL EMERGENCY ONLY.” It struck only the haziest chord of memory.
“The Prime Directive control code is the sequence just above the box,” Eighty-Five said. “Given my present needs and tasks, you should never require it.” The light blinked off.
Wrench had seen. “My God! Remember that, Lessing?”
He did not. Too much had happened. He could hear Goddard and his men shouting questions up the stairs.
“The piece of yellow paper… the one the Marine captain had… down inside Eighty-Five’s Washington installation… when we fought Golden… you know, dammit!” Wrench rattled on with rising excitement. “The captain’s paper with the prime computer codes on it! That’s it, Lessing! I thought it was lost when the Izzies took out Ponape!”
“The original may indeed have perished. Commander Wren. I photographed it, of course, when Mr. Lessing and the person you call ‘the captain’ held it up while standing on my operations dais. Although I was much smaller… more limited… in those days. Dr. Christy had already provided me with the means to acquire and maintain excellent records.”
Goddard’s head, like a black-furred bullet, appeared on the stair landing below Wrench. “You two jizmoes green light? Listen, we’ve got to get out of here! Pauline phoned to say something big’s happening back at headquarters.”
As they drove, they could see heaped masses of smoke over the buildings to the northeast. The rumble and thud of explosions reached them long before the flames came into view.
Nobody had to ask where the fire was.
We wrestle not against flesh and blood, but against principalities, against powers, against the rulers of the darkness of this world, against spiritual wickedness in high places.
CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT
Wednesday, October 5, 2050: 1730 hours
“Pull over! Pull over!” Goddard howled at Chuck Gillem, who was driving the armored car they had commandeered back in Annandale. “We can’t get through!”
Their caravan was approaching the Theodore Roosevelt Bridge from the southwest. Ahead, across the Potomac, six big military helicopters buzzed and whirled and twirled like khaki-hued dragonflies above the headquarters of the Party of Humankind. Rocket trails crisscrossed the mist-tattered sky, and the thunder of bursting high explosives struck at them like multiple hammer blows. The top of the building was invisible beneath a pall of smoke, amidst which tongues of flame leaped and undulated like graceful, scarlet dancers. Traffic on the bridge was stalled. Cars were turned every which way, and their occupants peered out like fearful, little insects to watch the gods do battle above their heads.
“They’ll have the hotel cordoned off,” Lessing shouted above the din. “Korinek knows we’re here, and he’ll be waiting for us to try to punch through.” He raised the hatch to check. Their other three vehicles were close behind, as were the fire engines. The police squad cars and unmarked PHASE vehicles were scattered farther back in the milling chaos on the freeway.
“Get your city cops out to direct traffic,” Lessing told Goddard. “Pretend that we think this is an ordinary hostage situation or a big accidental fire. Push the fire engines through with our paramedics and rescue teams.”
“You want to help Korinek?” Wrench cried in Lessing’s ear. He uttered a nervous giggle.
“Of course not! But with too many witnesses Korinek can’t shoot our people out of hand. Meanwhile, we stop here and load our best troops into our ambulances. Then we try for the basement parking entrance. We pick up our survivors…” he refused to think about Liese “… and get the hell out of Washington, contact our support, and decide what the pog to do next!”
“This won’t be another Ponape,” Goddard promised grimly. “They kick ass, we kick ass. Only we kick harder.” He leaned forward to tap Dan Grote, their corn-link man, on the shoulder. “Get on the horn and see if you can raise our friends at the Pentagon out at Andrews… Fort Meyer.”
“Fort Meyer’s close,” Gillem called from the driver’s seat. “I can get us there in a few minutes. We pick up some military heat of our own, come back, and… whango!”
“No good!” Lessing countered. ‘Korinek’ll have knocked the hotel flat by that time. Our people’ll be dead or captured… if he’s taking any prisoners!”
“Jesus…!” Goddard swore. “It is time… it is long past time… somebody fixed that duiker’s wagon!”
They halted on the bridge. The SWAT-men manned their vehicles’ 7.62-mm machine guns, but the helicopters did not attack. It seemed to take forever to choose twenty men, arm them from the armored vehicles’ store of combat weapons, and transfer them into the ambulances. Goddard sent the city police fanning out ahead to clear traffic and restore order, while the rest of their SWAT teams were detailed to push straight through with their armor and create a diversion on the western side of Korinek’s cordon One unmarked PHASE car raced off to inform Mulder’s headquarters in Virginia. Their foes were probably jamming radio transmission, and the TV stations were almost certainly wrecked, under arrest, or singing Korinek’s song in whatever key he chose!