For one thing, they’d had few occasions to see, up close, the mining robots that prowled the surface of the planet beneath them, the machines that paid all their salaries, and to find one looming amid the wreckage of Star Queen’s bridge, even exposed and enfeebled, was plain ter- rifying. They approached the machine as divers might approach a comatose great white shark.
Except for the robot, which proved disabled, the ship was deserted. For a long time none of the patrollers noticed that the two spacesuits which had hung on the stores deck were missing.
Sparta and Blake had ditched the suits five minutes after they’d put them on. Again they’d taken to the darkened ventilator shafts, the conduits. She knew the back ways as he could not, having stored a thousand engineering diagrams in her memory, but he’d been careful to memorize what he needed to know about the internal layout of Port Hesperus before he’d left Earth, even then planning his assault on Star Queen.
“Three half-ounce wads of plastique on a timer for the pressure hatch,” he told her. “Cutter charge on the auxiliary cables, also on a timer. Threw the main bus breakers myself —wanted to make sure I didn’t do any real damage. A couple of the power plant workers will have ether hangovers.
. . .”
“C-4? Not fulminate of gold? Acetylene detonators?”
They spoke on the move, chasing each other through the shadowy maze.
“Who’d use that junk? That’s dangerous as hell.”
“Somebody who didn’t care about danger and wanted the debris to look like an explosion in a fuel cell.”
“Star Queen was sabotaged?”
“You may be the last person in the solar system to hear the news. Assuming you didn’t do it yourself.”
He laughed.
“I need the rest of your story, Blake, before I make up my mind what to do with you.”
“Let’s stop here a minute,” he said. Following a manifold of pipes and cables, they had reached the mid-region of the core. They were in a substation, surrounded by huge pumps and fat gray transformers; the twilight gloom was striped with bright bars of light projected from a grating below, creeping slowly with the station’s rotation. Through the bars they could see straight into the central sphere, ringed with trees and gardens and the twin concourses of the station’s social center.
“I didn’t take explosives courses in SPARTA, Linda—”
“Don’t call me that, ever.” Her angry warning echoed in the metal chamber.
“It’s too late. They know who you are.”
“Yeah? Well I know who they are.” Her voice betrayed her, for she was tired, and the fear surfaced. “What I don’t know is where they are.”
“One of them is here, on this station. Looking for you.
That’s why I went for all the fireworks—so I could get to you alone. Before they did.”
“Who is it?”
“I don’t think I’d recognize him. Or her. Maybe you would.”
“Dammit.” She sighed. “Start from the beginning, will you?”
He took a breath, closed his eyes, and let his breath out slowly. When he opened his dark eyes they glowed in the warm light from below. “SPARTA broke up a year after you left it. There were probably a dozen of us at my level then, the sixteen-and seventeen-year-olds—Ron, Khalid, Sara, Louis, Rosaria . . .”
She interrupted him. “That far back my memory is excellent.”
“The spring after you left some weird characters came around to see us from a government agency. These people were recruiters, looking for volunteers for a ‘supplementary training program,’ making lots of heavy hints about the black side. We were given the distinct impression that you had gone before us . . . and you were everybody’s idol, of course.”
“Everybody’s scapegoat, you mean.”
“That too, sometimes.” He smiled at the memory.
“Anyway, we were suckers for the pitch. I was, anyway. I signed up—got into a shouting match with my mom and dad, but they finally gave in—and I went off to summer camp with a few of the others. This was in eastern Arizona, high up on the Mogollon Rim. We were there maybe three weeks. They knew we were in good shape, so they got right into the intellectual stuff. Survival. Ciphers. Demolition.
Silent killing. Later I realized it was all lightweight, child’s play. An audition—a sieve, really, to catch those of us who were talented. Psychologically susceptible.”
“Who’d they catch? You and who else?”
“Nobody. Your father showed up one afternoon. He had plainclothes heavies with him, FBI maybe. I never saw him so angry; he just terrorized these selfstyled tough guys who were running the place. To us kids he didn’t say much, but we could see his heart was breaking. We were on carriers back to Phoenix an hour later. That was the end of summer camp.” Blake paused. “That was the last time I saw your father. I never saw your mother again, either.”
“They’re dead. Officially. Chopper crash in Maryland.”
“Yes. Did you go to the funeral?”
“Maybe. Maybe not. That’s the year that’s missing from my memory.”
“Nobody I’ve talked to went to the funeral. We heard that—about the crash—a month, after we got home.
SPARTA just fell apart, then. Next fall we were dispersed, most of us in private colleges—surrounded by people we thought of as retarded. We still had a whole lot to learn.
What happened to you, nobody ever heard.”
“What did happen to me?”
Blake looked at her, his warm eyes softening. “This isn’t from experience, this is from research,” he said. “In some of the journals you’ll find that about that time, there was a program to inject self-replicating biochips into human subjects. This program was supposed to be under Navy control, because they were the biochip experts, instead of under Health or Science as you’d expect. The first subject was somebody who was supposedly clinically dead, brain-dead.”
“A neat cover story.” She laughed, but there was bitterness in her voice. “All they did was reverse cause and effect.”
He waited, but she said no more. “This subject supposedly showed remarkable improvement at first, but then became severely disturbed and had to be placed in permanent care. A private place in Colorado.”
“Biochips wasn’t all they did, Blake,” she whispered.
“They had a lot to hide.”
“I’ve begun to gather that,” he said. “They did their best. Four years ago the place in Colorado burned down.
Killed a dozen people. End of trail.”
“Everything you’ve told me I’ve already reconstructed for myself,” she said impatiently.
“If I hadn’t already seen you alive, I would have given up. How did you escape?”
“The doctor who was supposed to be my watchdog— his conscience must have started bothering him. He used biochips to repair the lesions they’d made. I started remembering.
. . .” She turned to him and without thinking gripped his arm, hard. “What happened during that missing year? What were they really trying to do? What did I do that scared them, made them turn me into a vegetable?”
“Maybe you learned something,” he said.
She started to speak but hesitated; his tone alerted her that she might not like what she heard. She withdrew her hand and quietly asked, “What do you suppose it was?”
“I think you learned that SPARTA was more than your father and mother claimed. The tip of a huge iceberg, an ancient iceberg.” He studied her while the station rolled in space and the bright bars of light through the grill sliced his shadowy features to ribbons. “There’s a theory. An ideal. Men and women have been burned in the service of that ideal. Others who believed in it have been praised as great philosophers. And some believers gained power and became monsters. The more I study this subject, the more connections I find, and the farther back they reach—in the 13th century they were known as adepts of the Free Spirit, the prophetae—but whatever name they used, they’ve never been eradicated. Their goal has always been godhood.
Perfection in this life. Superman.”
Sparta’s mind was tingling; images danced in the halflight but flickered strobing away before she could raise them to consciousness. The peculiar vibration overcame her ordinary sight; she pressed her fingers to her closed eyelids. “My parents were psychologists, scientists,” she whispered.
“There has always been a dark side and a light side, a black side and a white side.” Patiently he waited until she opened her eyes again. “The man who ran M.I. was named Laird,” he said. “He tried to keep his involvement a secret.”
“I recognize the name.”
“Laird knew your parents for years, decades. Since before they immigrated. Maybe he knew something that would embarrass them.”
“No,” she whispered. “No, Blake, I think he seduced them with visions of an easier route to perfection.”
“You’ve remembered something new?”
She looked around, distracted and nervous. “You’ve been helpful, Blake. It’s time we got to the rest of our business.”