Jack Chalker - Downtiming the Night Side

“Maybe not,” Moosic responded, “but it’ll get everybody else down there. You can’t tell me they can work all that stuff down there without anybody except their inside man.”

“Hardly. The computer alone would freeze up without five different operators at five different locations, each of whom knows only part of the code. And one of those operators is at the end of a special phone line topside and a mile from here.”

“Then we either wait for them or go after them. The Air Force thing is one way, but with the commotion they caused getting down there’s no way out short of hostages, and those they’ve got.”

Riggs took complete charge. He ordered various security personnel to make certain all exits were blocked with heavy firepower, ordered another to establish an external command post, and still others to report to NSA and Pentagon higher-ups. Finally he put a heavy firepower team at the only stairway exit, and it proceeded to line the area with enough explosive to bring down the entire wing. Nobody was going to get out that way without Riggs’ personal permission.

Then they walked back to the security command center, which hadn’t been taken or touched. It had been the key to the Air Force team’s success, but these people hadn’t touched it. They obviously had no intention of coming back out this way—or they wanted it intact for reasons of their own.

The command center was impressive, with its masses of monitors and one whole wall showing a complete schematic of the entire installation, even the public parts, parking lots and roads, along with lights indicating the location of cameras, mikes, and defensive equipment. Much of the board was flashing bright red.

The security personnel inside the center had remained at their posts, but it was clear that they were bewildered and frustrated. They had been attacked in a manner that the installation was designed to thwart, and the invaders had simply marched right through.

A crisp, professional-looking woman with gray hair sat at the master controls and barely looked up as Riggs and Moosic entered.

“Hey, Marge? What’s the story?” Riggs called.

“Twenty-four dead, thirteen critical, about forty more with minors, give or take,” she responded. “They’re immune to all our gasses and pretty cold-blooded. I’ll put them up on number six for you over there. Three men, one woman. No makes yet, but give us time.”

Riggs and Moosic went over to one of the monitor banks. A screen flickered and came on, then a whole series, showing every room below. Most had unconscious forms, lying about, a sea of limp forms in lab whites. In the central control chamber, though, the four were clearly visible. No—not four. Five. “Who’s that other one?” Moosic asked.

Riggs ordered a zoom. She was in her late twenties or early thirties, short, fat, and dumpy, with big hornrimmed glasses, the lenses of which looked like the bottoms of Coke bottles.

“Karen Cline,” Riggs told him. “There’s our insider. My career was already shot to hell, but I’ll still retire. Somebody back at the Palace is going to swing for this.”

Moosic looked at the woman. “What’s her rank?”

“Oh, she’s a top-grade physicist. I don’t know how they got to her, though. Conservative family, workaholic, and don’t let her looks fool you. She’s slept with so many guys they need a separate computer just to keep track of them. Just goes to show you.”

“Got a make on two of them,” Marge called from the command console. “The young, good-looking boy is Roberto Sandoval, twenty-eight, born in Ponce, Puerto Rico. The girl’s Christine Austin-Venneman, twenty-four, born in Oakland, California.”

“Terrific,” Riggs muttered. Christine Austin-Venneman was the daughter of one of the country’s most prominent liberal Congressmen, a very popular and powerful man. Her mother was the heir to a fairly large fortune based on natural gas, and had always felt guilty about it. If there was a liberal cause, she was in the forefront of it and usually much of the bankroll behind it. Christine had been on forty protest marches for twenty causes in half the states in the union before she was five.

“More on Sandoval,” Marge reported. “Father unknown, mother a committed FALN member and revolutionary Trotskyite, trained in Cuba and Libya years ago. His mother was killed three years ago when a bomb she was working on blew up her and her safe house in Washington. Sandoval is suspected of being involved in several robberies and bombings, mostly in the New York area, since that time. Since Austin-Venneman’s mother organized the March on the U.N. for the Liberation of Puerto Rico from Colonialism last year, we can guess how the two got together.”

Both security men nodded absently. The figures below seemed in no hurry, but all had nasty-looking weapons, except for Cline, and were making a methodical check of the area, room by room. A small status line at the bottom of each monitor indicated that gas had been released throughout the complex and that the elevator and stairway doors were sealed.

Ron Moosic just stared at them and felt helpless. His first day on the job and this happened. He looked at the status line again and noticed that there were two small blinking areas in it on the right. “What are they?” he asked Riggs.

“The area is far too dangerous to risk. Those are last-resort items. There is enough explosive in the walls to fry and liquefy the whole lower complex. They’re on a failsafe mechanism, though. We can fire them, but we can’t arm them. Only the President or the collective Joint Chiefs can do that. If the left one stops blinking, it means the system is armed and at our discretion. If both go solid, we have twenty minutes to clear out, or so they told us.”

At that moment the left one stopped blinking.

Ron Moosic suddenly felt like the President faced with Armageddon on the day of his inaugural. He didn’t even know the names of most of these people or the way to the nearest men’s room, yet here he was, facing what might quickly become the shortest job he’d ever had.

Riggs looked over at him. “Well? What do you think?”

I think I want to know the location of the men’s room, he thought sourly, but aloud he said, “You say there’s no way they can operate the time machine or whatever from down there?”

Riggs nodded. “There’s no bypassing that outside code, and nobody down there or even up here knows what it is.”

Moosic sighed. “Then all you’ve got here, when all is said and done, is a classic hostage situation. Sooner or later they’ll threaten to shoot the hostages one by one if we don’t come up with the code, but if we blow it we just as surely kill them all. They’ve trapped themselves, and even if they eventually go suicidal, we’re no worse off than if we push their button. I’d say let’s string ’em along and work at getting them. They have the counters for a lot of the nasty stuff, but they still have to get air down there from somewhere.”

“It’s all super-filtered stuff from its own buried source. No way to get a man in there. Still—I’ll get a team working on tapping into it. We already have one working on bypassing the stairway seals. If we can just buy enough time, we can puke ’em to death. There’s some pretty nasty stuff near here I can get my hands on, stuff that’s absorbed by the skin and pretty ugly, but stuff with an antidote. I agree.”

Riggs left to issue the proper set of commands, leaving Moosic alone to watch the monitors and think. He didn’t like to think much right now, but he did feel a little bit more comfortable with a classical hostage situation. He watched the tiny figures on the monitors and tried to figure out just what they were doing.