Jordan shook his head. “He’s scrubbed the assault and is sending in a nuclear warhead.”
Kern went ashen. “Then it’s down to the wire.”
Jordan nodded heavily as he looked up at the clock and saw only forty-three minutes remaining. “Why in God’s name can’t they break free? What happened to the British agent? Why doesn’t he communicate?”
Despite their fears, Jordan and Kern were not remotely prepared for an even worse disaster in the making.
Nogami guided the MAIT team through a series of small side passageways filled with heating and ventilating pipes, skirting heavily populated offices and workshops, keeping as far out of the mainstream of activity as possible. When confronted by a roboguard, Nogami engaged it in conversation while one of the others slowly angled in close and shut down its circuits with a charge of static electricity.
They came to a glass-enclosed room, a large expansive area filled with electrical wiring and fiber-optic bundles, all branching out into narrow tunnels leading throughout the Dragon Center. There was a robot standing in front of a huge console of various dials and digital instruments.
“An inspector robot,” said Nogami softly. “He’s programmed to monitor the systems and report any shorts or disconnects.”
“After we queer his circuits, how long before his supervisor sends someone to check on him?” asked Mancuso.
“From the main telepresence control, five or six minutes.”
“Plenty of time to place the charge and be on our way,” said Weatherhill casually.
“What do you figure for the timer setting?” Stacy asked him.
“Twenty minutes. That should see us safely to the surface and off the island if Pitt and Giordino come through.”
Nogami pushed open the door and stepped aside as Mancuso and Weatherhill entered the room and approached the robot from opposite sides. Stacy remained in the doorway, acting as lookout. The mechanical inspector stiffened at his console like a metal sculpture as the statically charged hoses made contact with his circuit housing.
Smoothly, skillfully, Weatherhill inserted the tiny detonator into the plastic explosive and set the digital timer. “In amongst the cables and optical fibers, I think.”
“Why not destroy the console?” said Nogami.
“They’ve probably got backup units in a supply warehouse somewhere,” explained Mancuso.
Weatherhill nodded in agreement as he moved up a passageway a short distance and taped the charge behind several bundles of heavily insulated cable and optical fibers. “They can replace the console and reconnect new terminal leads in twenty-four hours,” he lectured, “but blow a meter out of the middle of a thousand wires and they’ll have to replace the whole system from both ends. It will take them five times as long.”
“Sounds fair,” Nogami acquiesced.
“Don’t make it obvious,” said Mancuso.
Weatherhill looked at him reproachfully. “They won’t be looking for something they don’t know exists.” He gave a love pat to the timer and exited the passageway.
“All clear,” Stacy reported from the doorway.
One at a time they moved furtively into the corridor and hurried toward the elevator. They had covered nearly two hundred meters when Nogami suddenly halted and held up his hand. The sound of human voices echoed along the concrete walls of a side passage followed by the soft whirr of an electric motor. Nogami furiously gestured for them to move ahead, and they darted across the opening and rushed around a corner before the intruders came into sight of the main corridor.
“I misjudged their efficiency,” Nogami whispered without turning. “They’re early.”
“Investigators?” Stacy asked him.
“No,” he answered quickly. “Telepresence supervisors with a replacement for the robot you put out of commission.”
“You think they might be onto us?”
“We’d know if they were. A general alarm would be sounded and a horde of Suma’s human security forces along with an army of roboguards would have swarmed through every corridor and blocked all intersections.”
“Lucky someone hasn’t smelled a rat from all the robots we’ve wasted,” grunted Mancuso as he rushed along the corridor in Nogami’s trail.
“Without obvious signs of damage, the telepresence supervisors will think they suffered from simple electronic malfunctions.”
They reached the elevator and lost a full two minutes as they waited for it to rise from a lower level. After what seemed half a lifetime, the doors finally opened to an empty interior. Weatherhill was the first in, and he pressed the button for the surface level.
The elevator, with the three men and one woman standing grimly and silently, rose with excruciating slowness. Only Nogami had a watch, the others having lost theirs when they were captured. He peered at the dial.
“Thirty seconds to spare,” he informed them.
“Out of the fire,” murmured Mancuso. “Now let’s hope there’s no frying pan.
All that mattered now was their escape. What plan did Pitt have circulating inside his head? Had anything happened to him and Giordino? Had Pitt miscalculated and was he recaptured or dead? If he was, then all hope had vanished and they were left with nothing, no direction for freedom, their only hope of escape struck down.
They had lost track of the number of times they’d prepared for the worst, crouched ready to spring at whatever or whoever stood outside the elevator. They stiffened as the doors pulled apart.
Giordino stood there big as life, a broad grin on his face. When he spoke it was as though he was standing at the gate of an airport. “May I see your boarding passes, please?”
Ubunai Okuma and Daisetz Kano were top-level robotic engineers, highly trained in the teleoperation of computer vision and artificial intelligence, as well as the maintenance and troubleshooting of sensory malfunctions. In the telepresence control room they had received a signal that robot electrical inspector Taiho, whose name meant “big gun,” was nonfunctioning, and they immediately moved to replace him for repair.
Sudden breakdown from myriad problems was not uncommon. Robotics was still a new science, and bugs cropped up with maddening frequency. Robots often stalled abruptly for reasons that became readily apparent only after they were returned to a reconditioning center and probed.
Kano circled Inspector Taiho, making a quick visual check. Seeing nothing obvious, he shrugged. “Looks like a faulty circuit board.”
Okuma glanced at a chart on a clipboard that he carried. “This one has a history of problems. His vision imaging has caused trouble on five different occasions.”
“Strange, this is the fourth unit to be reported as failed in the past hour.”
“It always runs in streaks,” muttered Okuma.
“His systems need updating and modifying,” agreed Kano. “No sense in giving him a quick fix. I’ll schedule him for a complete rebuild.” He turned to the replacement robot. “Ready to assume inspection duties, Otokodate?”
An array of lights flashed and Otokodate, a term for a sort of Robin Hood, spoke in slow but crisp words. “I am ready to monitor all systems.”
“Then begin.”
As the replacement robot took its place at the monitor, Okuma and Kano hoisted the malfunctioning robot onto a motorized dolly with a small crane. Then one of them programmed a code word into the dolly’s computer and it began to move automatically toward the conditioning area without human control. The two engineers did not accompany the injured robot but made their way toward the workers’ comfort room to indulge in a brief cup of tea.
Left alone, Otokodate concentrated his vision system on the dials and blinking digital readings and routinely began to process the data in his computer. His high-level sensing ability, incredibly advanced over a human’s, caught an infinitesimal deviation of measurement.
The laser pulse rate through an optic fiber is measured in millions of beats per second. Otokodate’s sensors could read the instrument measurements far more accurately than a human, and he recognized a minuscule drop in the pulse rate from the standard 44.7 million beats per second to 44.68 million. He computed the refractive index profile and determined that the light transmitting its waves through two of the strands inside a ribbon containing thousands of optic fibers was temporarily zigzagging at some point.